On a large estate where you have a mixture of laptops, desktops and servers, it can be virtually impossible to work out which machines aren't connecting properly. As some laptops will be turned off due to people being on leave etc. but how do you find out which machines aren't connecting to the SEPM correctly without logging onto every single one and checking the local SEP client?
Can anyone think of an easy way to check this? or a service on the SEP client that con be monitored by another product to confirm it's connectivity to the SEPM as there doesn't seem to be an easy way to check this. An also if you have the SEPM set to delete offline machines that have not checking over the past 30 days you may not find out about the machine not connecting till someone is on the machine and raises an issues with SEP being out of date which is something alot of basic users will not know to do or check.
I recently did some upgrades of some machines in a test group and upgraded about 100 machines I found that 5 of them after the upgrade for no reason had changed to offline/self-managed where they were fine before the upgrade and were checking in. The upgrade package was set to keep all existing settings. These upgrades were to the latest 12.1 RU6 MP4 package but have noticed it in previous versions also.