Intune Device Query now allows queries for multiple devices as part of Advanced Analytics

A long-awaited feature is now finally available as part of Intune Advanced Analytics (part of Intune Suite). The KQL based device query feature, allows now to write queries for multiple devices. Device Query for Multiple Devices

Single device Query

As a recap, what was the “normal” single device query all about? If you went to a single device in Intune and needed to get a inventory information that was not part of the Hardware Inventory like the CPU Model you could write a short KQL Query and given that the device is online at the moment, you would get a live answer:

The Hardware inventory in Intune only shows me that my surface is using an arm64 CPU but not which model:

So with single device query, we can ask the device directly for this information:

This request will take a moment, since it’s actually asking the device right now, similar to how CMPivot worked in MECM/SCCM:

Multi device query

So now that we remember what single device query was, let’s have a look at the new multi device query. If you have Advanced Analytics enabled, either as standalone add-on or via Intune Suite, you should now see a new Button in the devices overview “Device query”:

Once we click on it, we get presented with a similar screen as before, however these queries will run against a previously defined set of information, as it will leverage the “Resource explorer” inventory that I described here: Intune hardware inventory is now available – Mike’s MDM Blog. If you haven’t seen this part, I would recommend having a look at this first.

If we choose to go with the same query about everything CPU, we now get a list of devices with the information that we wanted, my CPU Model:

For this query, the devices do not have to be reachable at the time of query, since it uses already collected information. We even have some sample queries available on the “Get started” page, which gives you an idea about what’s possible:

Conclusion

For me multi device query is a huge step in the history of Intune, since it has the potential to eliminate the need of 3rd party tools or custom data exports like I showed in the past with my export to Cosmos DB / PowerBI. Now we have a fully supported and integrated solution to get way more information about our (windows) device fleet.