Better Together: Why Microsoft Intune and ControlUp Are Both Essential for Modern IT

Intune handles management. ControlUp handles experience. Here’s why you need both.

If you’re an IT administrator managing a modern Windows environment, Microsoft Intune is almost certainly part of your stack. And it should be. Intune is the industry-standard foundation for device enrollment, OS configuration, app deployment, compliance policy, and security baseline enforcement. ControlUp customers use it. Our partners use it. We build with it, not against it.

But here’s what we hear from IT teams every day: even with Intune fully deployed, they still can’t answer some of the most important questions in their environment.

Questions like:

• Why is a specific user’s laptop feeling slow, even though all compliance checks are green?
• Why is Teams call quality terrible for the sales team in Chicago, but fine everywhere else?
• An employee just called the help desk. What happened on their device in the last 30 minutes?
• Can we automatically fix this issue before the user even notices it?

These aren’t Intune gaps. They’re simply a different set of questions that ControlUp can supercharge Microsoft Intune and help answer.

Intune Is the Foundation. Build on It.

Microsoft Intune does several things exceptionally well, and no IT team should be without it:

• Device enrollment and lifecycle management: Intune is how you onboard devices at scale — whether through Windows Autopilot, Apple Business Manager, or Android Enterprise. It’s the authoritative source of truth for what devices exist in your organization.
• OS configuration and security baselines: Group policies, security baselines, Conditional Access integration with Entra ID, BitLocker enforcement, Windows Update for Business — Intune owns this layer, and rightly so.
• Application deployment: Pushing Win32 apps, Microsoft Store apps, and line-of-business applications to thousands of devices reliably and at scale is where Intune excels.
• Compliance and policy enforcement: Intune tells you whether a device meets your policies. It’s the enforcement layer that connects to your Zero Trust strategy.
• Integration with the Microsoft ecosystem: Defender for Endpoint, Entra ID, Conditional Access, Microsoft Purview — Intune is the connective tissue of the Microsoft security and management stack.

ControlUp treats Intune as the authoritative source of truth for device inventory. We actually sync directly with the Microsoft Graph API so that devices enrolled in Intune — even those without a ControlUp agent installed yet — are visible in the ControlUp platform. Intune’s data enriches what we can see. That’s how a true partnership works.

→ Learn More About ControlUp and Intune 

So, What Does ControlUp Add?

Think of the relationship this way: Intune manages the device state. ControlUp monitors the user experience.

Intune knows that a device is enrolled, compliant, and has the right apps installed. ControlUp knows, in real time, whether the person sitting at that device is having a good or bad experience right now. It can also do something about it instantly.

Real-time Experience Intelligence

ControlUp’s DEX Score gives every device a live 0–10 experience rating, recalculated every minute. It factors in CPU pressure, available memory, network latency, Wi-Fi signal strength, user input delays, application crashes, and more. If a BSOD occurs, the score immediately drops to zero, surfacing that device for urgent attention.

Intune’s Advanced Analytics reports reveal device trends over a 24-hour data window. ControlUp tells you what is happening right now, for every user, all the time.

Deep Network and UC&C Visibility

ControlUp monitors network latency from every endpoint continuously — including traceroute data, ISP identification, and per-connection performance. For remote and hybrid workers, this is often the first place a problem shows up.

For Microsoft Teams calls, ControlUp captures per-minute jitter, frame loss, and packet loss at the agent level, combined with Microsoft Graph API data — giving IT a live view of call quality that neither the Teams Admin Center nor Intune provides on its own.

Automation and Remediation (Not Just Alerts)

This is where real productivity gain lives. When ControlUp detects an issue, it doesn’t just raise a ticket. It can execute a fix automatically.

ControlUp’s scripting engine — supporting PowerShell, CMD, bash, and zsh — lets IT teams build auto-remediation rules that trigger the moment a threshold is crossed. High CPU load? Clear the process. Memory pressure? Restart the culpable service. Network latency spike? Notify the user with context. And when Intune is already in the environment, ControlUp for Compliance can hand remediation jobs directly to Intune for deployment — using the trusted deployment channel your team already relies on.

“When creating a remediation job in ControlUp for Compliance, IT administrators can select Intune as the delivery mechanism. ControlUp automatically packages the application and sends it to the customer’s Microsoft Intune environment — no manual repackaging, no console switching.”

Self-service That Actually Works

ControlUp’s Self-Service Hub (launched January 2026) gives end users the ability to self-diagnose and resolve common issues through a guided interface, reducing help desk volume and resolving problems before they escalate. Behind the scenes, ControlUp Connect can autonomously investigate issues and remediate them, often before the user even picks up the phone.

Intune’s Company Portal is excellent for app access and enrollment. ControlUp’s Self-Service Hub is for real-time troubleshooting and autonomous remediation.

Two Products, One Unified Workflow

One of the things we’re most proud of is how tightly ControlUp and Intune can work together — not as separate tools you must switch between, but as a unified experience.

Enrich: ControlUp Data Inside the Intune Console

ControlUp Enrich is a browser extension that surfaces real-time ControlUp device performance and experience data directly inside the Microsoft Intune admin center. When an IT admin is looking at a device record in Intune, they can see its ControlUp DEX score, performance metrics, and experience history without leaving Intune.

Intune as a Device Inventory Source of Truth

ControlUp now uses Microsoft Intune as an authoritative source of truth for device inventory. Even devices that don’t yet have a ControlUp agent are visible in the ControlUp platform if they’re enrolled in Intune, giving IT teams a complete picture of their managed estate with no blind spots.

Microsoft Security Copilot Integration

ControlUp publishes a Microsoft Security Copilot plugin that combines Intune management context with ControlUp device performance insights, letting IT and security teams ask natural-language questions across both data sets from a single interface.

A Real-World Scenario: The Slow Laptop

Here’s a story we hear often.

An employee calls the help desk: “My laptop is really slow.” The help desk checks Intune — device is enrolled, compliant, all policies applied, apps up to date. Everything looks fine. The ticket gets assigned to Tier 2, who remotes in, can’t reproduce the issue, and closes it. The employee is still frustrated.

With ControlUp in the picture, that same scenario plays out differently:

• Before the call happens: ControlUp’s alerting engine detects that the user’s DEX score dropped below 4 over the last 20 minutes due to sustained CPU pressure from a background process. An automated script clears the process and logs a device event.
• If a call still comes in: The help desk agent opens the ControlUp device timeline and sees exactly what happened — a software update triggered a CPU-intensive scan at 10:47 AM, coinciding with the user’s Teams call. The context is instant.
• Permanent fix: The IT team configures a ControlUp compliance rule to reschedule the scan outside business hours and uses Intune as the deployment channel to push the updated configuration to all affected devices.

Intune provides compliance and deployment infrastructure. ControlUp provides real-time visibility and automated remediation. Both did their jobs.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft Intune is not optional for modern endpoint management. Every ControlUp customer should have it, use it, and rely on it for the things it does best: enrollment, configuration, security policy, app deployment, and compliance.

But Intune was built to manage devices. ControlUp was built to champion the people using them.

When you add ControlUp to an Intune environment, you don’t replace anything. You gain a real-time view into the quality of every employee’s digital experience, the ability to remediate issues before they become tickets, and an automation layer that lets your IT team be proactive instead of reactive.

ControlUp and Microsoft Intune are better together, and that’s not a marketing phrase! It’s how we designed the integration, how we built the product, and how our shared customers run their IT operations every day.

Want to see how ControlUp complements your Intune investment?

Book a demo or speak to your ControlUp account team.

Jeff Johnson

Jeff is a product marketing manager for ControlUp. He is responsible for evangelizing the Digital Employee Experience on physical endpoints such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Jeff has spent his career specializing in enterprise strategies for client computing, application delivery, virtualization, and systems management. Jeff was one of the key architects of the Consumerization of IT Strategy for Microsoft, which has redefined how enterprises allow unmanaged devices to access corporate intellectual property.