Is Onboarding Servers into Defender a Pain for Anyone Else?
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TechieWhiz456
I've been dealing with onboarding our servers into Defender, and it's been such a hassle! Sometimes it works like a charm, but other times it's just a mess. Servers randomly stop checking in, certain components fail, and I've even tried scripting the process, but the various issues make it unreliable. I'm curious if other people are facing the same challenges or if it's just us.
Answers
When I was at a managed services provider, the main issues we had were with older operating systems missing prerequisites. If any other antivirus products weren’t completely uninstalled, you'd see incomplete data in reports too.
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Honestly, I didn't have any major issues. The onboarding process has been rather straightforward for me, no complaints!
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All I faced was an initial hiccup getting started. I just had to toggle the policy off and back on to get it going. After that, it was pretty smooth sailing!
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I've worked with multiple antivirus solutions like McAfee and Crowdstrike, and I find Defender for Business to be the most solid and easy to use. It’s been flawless for me.
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I only encountered a few odd cases, mainly with older 2016 servers that were missing components. Other than that, it’s been generally smooth for everything else!
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For the servers that aren’t registering, a simple solution is to run the Defender offboarding script, restart the server, and then try onboarding again. That usually does the trick!
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We onboarded hundreds of servers and only had about a 2% failure rate. The few that failed were tricky to fix, often due to corrupt assembly errors that needed some weird fixes from Microsoft support. Overall, onboarding itself was smooth, though.
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For me, it’s surprisingly straightforward. I just run the onboarding script and manage policies with Group Policy Objects (GPO). I did notice that sometimes the onboarding GPO fails because it tries to execute when the machine is busy; it’ll time out even though the GPO says it's complete. Sounds like you might run into similar timing issues!
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TechieWhiz456: That’s interesting! Ours was easy too, at first. Just when I thought I had it down, some colleagues faced issues with their batches. We've had some machines that are showing ‘can be onboarded’ again, it's so frustrating!