This is a sponsored post from Callisto but is also a sincere piece from the author.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Since I started working with SCCM, in the SCCM 2007 days, data reporting has been an issue. It’s not the amount of data that is missing, since SCCM has a lot of it, but rather how it’s presented.
Creating reports in SCCM is quite a hassle and requires a decent technician to sort it out. The problem is that some kind of management is usually interested in this data.
I’ve been looking at different report solutions throughout the years and recently stumbled upon Callisto.
Callisto has grown significantly in the five years since its launch. Now available as an on-premises or a SaaS application, Callisto is a modern, responsive, intuitive, and beautiful interface to inventory, compliance, status, and more. With both versions of the product, all your data stays in your data center owing to a clever little data broker deployed on your ConfigMgr server for the SaaS version.
Friendly and Intuitive with Mighty Capabilities
Callisto is designed to be accessible to all users, from the helpdesk and your technical teams to managers, developers, and more. High-level views of all ConfigMgr disciplines, including inventory, OS Deployment, Content Source usage, and of course, Software Updates, lead to highly detailed reports.
Callisto includes over 20 dashboards and dozens of modals. The Software Update dashboard is one of six (soon to be seven) dashboard views detailing compliance information. As everywhere in Callisto, all charts and tables are clickable for more data. Everything can be filtered, sorted, and exported, and obeys RBAC.
The Device Modal view is one of the jewels in the crown of Callisto. Everything ConfigMgr knows about a device is gathered into one place. Unlike the console, where we might need device properties, the Resource Explorer, various reports, status messages, etc. In Callisto, everything is available in one view for immediate access.
The device modal also provides access to Console Tasks such as restart, policy operations, remote control, etc., with no need to install the ConfigMgr console.
Callisto isn’t simply copying the functionality of the ConfigMgr Console. It is based on real-world experience from the engineering team, who have been or are consultants. Everything you could ever want to know, from the impact of caching to which devices downloaded what content from the CMG, it’s all at your fingertips. Want to know where a specific client sourced a particular update from? No problem, there’s a tab in the device modal for that.
There’s More to Callisto
There’s a lot more to Callisto than ConfigMgr. With hooks into warranty APIs and Microsoft support data, you can access a lot of additional value on top of your ConfigMgr data. The Microsoft Security Research Center (MSRC) API integration is the most significant innovation. With this, Callisto is a fully-fledged CVE-hunting tool.
Using data from ConfigMgr, the Callisto team interrogates the MSRC API to identify your security posture from a CVE perspective. They clearly illustrate the updates missing from your environment leading to the CVE exposure and show you precisely which remediations are required to get back into compliance.
The next version, which I’ve been introduced to, builds on this data to identify updates, drivers, and firmware missing from your environment, even if you have shifted this workload to Intune or if the updates in question are not synchronized into your ConfigMgr Software Update Point. All this and integration with Intune are in the next release.
Conclusion
The Callisto team says, “Callisto is a single window into your entire Microsoft Management environment,” and I can see why. The current Callisto product is a superb addition to ConfigMgr, it empowers any of your teams to exploit the vast database of compliance and inventory that has been so hard to grasp with ConfigMgr to date, and the immediate development roadmap is something to be excited about.
There’s a live demo environment available at https://getcallisto.io. Just click “See Callisto LIVE” on the homepage. You can also trial Callisto SaaS and/or On-Premises in your environment.