Microsoft Upgrade Analytics Preview Adds Windows 10 Migration Support -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Upgrade Analytics Preview Adds Windows 10 Migration Support

By Kurt Mackie
07/22/2016

Microsoft released a preview of a new Windows 10 upgrade planning tool called "Upgrade Analytics."

A public preview of this new service was announced by Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski of Microsoft earlier this week in a new Microsoft Upgrade Analytics blog. Details on getting the preview subsequently were posted late on Friday in this second blog post.

The Upgrade Analytics service is part of the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which is a collection of services for managing public datacenter operations, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. OMS works with System Center, but also can be purchased separately, according to Microsoft's OMS pricing page.

The Upgrade Analytics tool is specifically designed to address the uncertainties of the "application and driver ecosystem" when moving to Windows 10, Klimaschewski explained. Here's the information that the Upgrade Analytics service delivers:

Up-to date application and driver inventory, including usage data
Information about known application and driver issues as well as guidance on how to mitigate them
A way to track whether an application or driver is ready Windows 10 in your organization
Per-Computer readiness information which you use to target computers for Windows 10 deployments

Upgrade Analytics uses "telemetry" to estimate application readiness. It categorizes the use of applications in an organization into "low install count," "not reviewed," "business critical," "important," and "review in progress" categories, according to this screen shot:

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Upgrade Analytics screenshot: Source: Microsoft blog post.

The Upgrade Analytics tool also lists how many computers are "OK to pilot" for Windows 10 upgrades. It shows a count of the computers that will get upgraded drivers at the time of the Windows 10 upgrade and those PCs that will need new drivers installed.

Microsoft has published some Upgrade Analytics documentation, which can be found at this this TechNet libray page.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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