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Introduction

Having Office 365 service health issues today?

IT wants to streamline its global monitoring operations and ease access to reporting. Doing so will provide insight into usage, uptime, and availability of O365 services. Because downtime affects business continuity. Covid disrupted the work culture and our daily lives. Everyone is working from home today. As a result, IT leaders are eager to ensure that all cloud services are readily available. 

But instead of accessing these apps through the data center, employees go to the Internet. Experience and productivity at each location vary by internet, ISP, gateway, proxy, etc. Businesses need visibility of SaaS performance to optimize and enhance the digital experience.

So, the question is how do you monitor Office 365 cloud service health status in a dashboard? Because Office 365 services can have issues!
Keep reading…

Exoprise Office 365 Service Health Status and Monitoring Dashboards

CloudReady Office 365 layoutsExoprise CloudReady is designed for the same.

Our sensors run synthetically either on a private site behind a firewall or in the cloud. CloudReady monitors SaaS services, degradation, interruptions, and captures server health data metrics. These metrics are present in a visual dashboard that updates in real-time. 

Since the last time we wrote about our Office 365 reporting and analytics capabilities, the engineering team at Exoprise has developed and launched three new dashboard layouts exclusively for Office 365. All predefined layouts are configurable and easy to use. End-users can select a variety of widgets for different purposes. No other providers offer comprehensive coverage for ALL your Office 365 operations along with crowd-sourced benchmarking.

Let us look at all of them.

  • Once you log in to your CloudReady account, head over to the personal Dashboard section on the left.
  • Once there, click on the (+) sign in the upper right to view the new Office 365 layouts.
  • Here you can select either of three layouts or immediately get a 360-degree operational view of the Office 365 apps (Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, Exchange, One Drive, Outlook, etc.) services. The assumption is that you have authorized Exoprise to read exporting data from Office 365. Also, while you get OAuth access, you can add authorization to enable CloudReady to receive and integrate Office 365 service health and incident messages.

Office 365 Monitoring Dashboard

Office 365 service health

This layout provides a holistic and high-level overview to check Office 365 service health. With built-in predefined widgets, IT can locate O365 service problems in global regions.
 
The solution health widget provides a summary view of all sites, heatmaps, and alarms
 
Integration with Office 365 service health provides key notifications to focus on troubleshooting and reduce MTTR.

Office 365 Usage Monitoring Dashboard

Office 365 health monitoring

The office 365 usage layout goes a step further providing low-level usage details for various Microsoft services such as Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, Skype, and Teams.

Widgets in this layout help IT managers understand the service usage and consumption patterns on a historical basis.

After comparing with benchmark usage, proactively plan to add additional capacity for optimal performance. Export usage data in a spreadsheet and share it with team members.

Office 365 Usage and Synthetics Monitoring Dashboard

Office 365 service health

The third layout brings hundreds of low-level metrics for various Office 365 services. Important metrics include Jitter, TTFB, latency, authentication and connect time, RTT, etc.
 
Under settings, configure the metric graph widget. Select from different periods and sensor types. Network admins monitor and correlate actionable data to keep track of their systems. This view is where the true power of Exoprise comes into view. With a dashboard like this you can see usage alongside long(er)-term trending of performance.

Suspect that your SharePoint tenant is getting slower as you have more users? Suspect that your email hygiene is getting slower as more emails are sent/received?

This is the perfect view for determining that. You can monitor mail flow and usage in one view. That are just a few examples of what is possible.

The Admin Center Doesn’t Cut it

Microsoft does report service outages and incidents. But let’s face it. It’s from their perspective of Microsoft’s data center and not end-to-end monitoring.

And all the alerts are available only in the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard (SHD). This dashboard doesn’t tell you about Office 365 problems at your end or tenant-specific issues.

It’s more about post-worthy service health status and therefore, is limited by its capabilities.

We need to accept that Microsoft is a service provider so the responsibility to monitor and check Office 365 service health is on you.

Office 365 Outage History

While the monitoring dashboards for Office 365 are useful to view service health trends, we also wanted to share prior outages detected early through our solution. Network administrators can correlate metrics from an ongoing outage with the Office 365 dashboards shown above.

Our track record for detecting Microsoft 365 outages is a testament to our capabilities.

Following is a list of outages

  • Microsoft Teams Outage on April 27th, 2021
  • Azure DNS Outage on April 1st, 2021
  • Microsoft 365 Outage on March 15th 2021
  • Exchange Online Mail Delivery Outage on February 3rd
  • Office 365 Outage on January 27th
  • Early Teams Outage Detection & Analysis on August 19-20 2020

For more information on monitoring Microsoft 365 service health, visit our Office 365 Outage detection page.

Get Office 365 Service Health Email Subscriptions

You can send email updates to your team or customers when Microsoft publishes new status or incident messages for Office 365 Service Health.

In the CloudReady tool, IT administrators can easily configure who they want the messages sent to. In addition, they can also filter what types of messages are sent.

How does that help?

Customers can subscribe to Office 365 Service Health status and not have to log into the Office 365 Admin Portal. The portal is completely integrated into CloudReady using the Office 365 service health communications API.

Read here to learn more about configuring the service health email subscriptions.

Monitor Office 365 Service Health and Status – All In One Place

Finally, the Exoprise UI team recently added Twitter status feed integration into dashboards. Incorporate, in one location, status feeds like@M365Status, @AzureSupport, @MSFTExchange, or @SharePoint. And of course, you can add feeds for any service into the dashboard to stay informed.
Unlike others, Exoprise offers complete Office 365 service health monitoring and reporting dashboards. In addition, you can set up service health email alerts and notifications to stay proactive.
Whether you are looking to migrate Office 365 services or monitor service usage for Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, Sharepoint, Exchange, etc., monitoring dashboards can provide your team a much needed real-time visibility.
Twitter Feeds Aggregate
Twitter feeds alongside real-time status and service health

Take your employee’s experience to the next level with Exoprise Office 365 service health monitoring tool. Request a demo and unlock value for your remote workforce and business.

Get in Touch for a Custom Demo

Learn how you can improve employee digital experience with browser synthetics and endpoint monitoring. Get a custom demo to see how we synthetically monitor Microsoft 365 with CloudReady as well as real user monitoring with Service Watch.

Sidharth Kumar is Director of Product Marketing and enjoys hearing about, discovering, and helping customers get value from Exoprise products.

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