How to Monitor ALL of Microsoft 365

Introduction

Only Exoprise provides full coverage for synthetic monitoring of the entire Microsoft 365 suite. The use of 8-10 different synthetic sensors per site provides customers and prospects with an ideal start. These site locations may include corporate headquarters, branch offices, or work from home settings with knowledge workers.

Exoprise effectively monitors the health, availability, and performance of applications such as Azure AD, Exchange Online, Teams, Yammer, OneDrive, Outlook, Portal, etc. via synthetic sensors and captures real-time metric data in CloudReady. Most sensors are a single sensor credit but some are more so IT administrators should obtain anywhere between 12-18 sensor credits per location depending on how deeply they want to monitor. Typically, a single virtual machine or laptop with 4GB of RAM and Windows easily supports such a configuration.

We detect Microsoft 365 outages 30 mins to 2 hours before Microsoft reports it online.

Monitoring Azure Active Directory (AAD)

Azure Active Directory is a multi-tenant cloud directory for identity management, authentication, and protection service. In your business, employees who work from home remotely or the office rely on Azure AD login to multiple Office 365 services and access them through a single set of cloud credentials. Monitoring Microsoft Azure AD within Exoprise is an OAuth-based Graph API test. Errors or performance problems with Azure AD sensors are usually an early indication of problems with other Microsoft services and have a cascading effect.

Azure AD serves as the backbone of the Office 365 system. Even if you do not use Azure AD for a single sign-on (SSO), it is the catalog for Office 365 identities, profile access, and permissions. In other words, there is a massive dependence on Azure AD. Its uptime, availability, and performance from multiple locations are hyper-critical to anyone using Office 365 or Azure.

Watch our video to see how to deploy Office 365 Azure AD sensor with our CloudReady monitoring tool and detect outages, real-time status, sign-in, and service issues.

Monitoring Exchange Online

The Email Graph sensor tests and monitors Microsoft Exchange Online using the new Graph API. As businesses continue to operate remotely, it is more important than ever to have a robust email communication infrastructure for collaboration. When email access is down or slow, it impacts end-user productivity, and businesses suffer. Imagine what would happen to remote workers if Exchange Online has an outage. The Email Graph API sensor synthetically tests Microsoft Graph authentication, permission access, uptime, and mailbox availability no matter what location.

Monitor Office 365 Mail queues, SPAM filters and troubleshoot slow email delivery for exchange online. Exoprise emulates a real user connecting to Exchange online for monitoring end-to-end experience pre or post migration. The email graph sensor sends synthetic emails between the mail platform and CloudReady autoresponders to test the email delivery, reliability, and performance of the underlying infrastructure. Once an email is generated, the sensor confirms that the message has been sent by checking the corresponding folders and headers on the outbound side and waits for a response.

Watch our video to see how our tool monitors office 365 Exchange Online for better email connectivity and real-time application service status.

Monitoring Outlook Web Access

Exoprise Outlook Web Access (OWA) sensor tests and monitors Office 365’s Outlook web app email access with a headless browser. The OWA sensor synthetically tests and emulates a real user signing or login into the email system page and collects backend login time metrics for end-to-end performance and availability monitoring. OWA is easy to use and set up for occasional users who may need quick access to Exchange email or calendar.

Exoprise CloudReady supports monitoring Microsoft Outlook Web Access from private sites behind the firewall and public clouds. The sensor works across various servers and single sign-on solutions to fully test Outlook web app and Exchange online application delivery. This allows ensuring that your Exchange and Office 365 tenant is working 100% correctly. By sending test messages to Exoprise auto-responder, customers can ensure that Office 365 web access mail delivery works properly and there are no slow email queues regardless of SPAM protection.

Monitoring Microsoft Portal

The Microsoft portal sensor tests and monitors the Microsoft 365 web portal for proactive performance and availability by automatically sign in and login as a real user from Exoprise private or public cloud sites and navigating through the portal. The sensor captures rich and contextual network performance data between the site and application.

Within the Login & Render tab, customers can easily access and analyze the Office 365 full portal login time trends over some time. The authentication time dictates how long it takes for a user to do a single sign-on in the Microsft 365 login portal. Identify and compare O365 portal metrics such as DOM Loaded Time, Initial Layout Time, Time to First Byte, CPU%, etc., and so on with Exoprise unique crowd-sourced data. The network path performance or NPP tab displays the user’s quick information about the current trace.

A waterfall representation of the trace provides a round trip time of each hop relative to other hops in the trace. Check for default alarms setup for the sensor and the corresponding error notification in real-time for Microsoft office portal.

Monitoring SharePoint Online

Microsoft SharePoint is a web-based solution for businesses to collaborate and share knowledge. SharePoint end-to-end monitoring is a headless browser complete coverage test that emulates a real user logging in, uploading, and downloading files providing bandwidth estimates. Exoprise proactively captures Logon times and detailed page metrics for faster troubleshooting pre or post-migration. Installing a SharePoint sensor on a private site is easy.

After successful installation, the Logon Tab provides end-users with detailed and crowd-based benchmark information on the Microsoft SharePoint logon duration. While the Logon Time is captured as part of the overall login process, Managed and Federated Login time deal with Office 365 and on-premise identity service respectively. Access and control to Office 365 SharePoint Online can be protected by a cloud-based or on-premise Single Sign-On (SSO) solution. Exoprise recommends setting up sensors for each to monitor authentication for Sharepoint Online.

Watch our video to monitor Microsoft Sharepoint Online and how our tool tests online login and end-to-end workflow functionality.

Monitoring OneDrive

Exoprise supports Microsoft OneDrive monitoring similar to SharePoint with OAuth credentials as well as full experience monitoring via a headless browser. The sensor emulates a real user sign in and login into Microsoft OneDrive online to collect end-to-end performance metrics such as health score, server latency, login times, etc. across the infrastructure and measure optimal availability.

After successful deployment of the OneDrive sensor, the Logon tab provides real-time statistics on page login information and the time it takes to log onto OneDrive server. The Managed and Federated Time provide Single Sign-On visibility into Office 365 cloud and on-premise identity service respectively. Check alarms and errors generated over a certain period of time. The Data Point Details tab provides an instant comparison between individual metrics and the crowd to find anomalies. Detect the slowest hop and trace data in the network performance tab.

Watch our video to monitor Office 365 OneDrive for Business and how our tool tests end-to-end functionality including login, page latency, storage, etc.

Monitoring Microsoft Teams Audio Video

Microsoft Teams is an enterprise collaboration platform that combines video, chat, voice, and file sharing for today’s workforce. Exoprise CloudReady Teams Audio Video (Teams AV) conferencing sensor utilizes WebRTC technology and an automated A/V Bot to monitor the health and performance of Microsoft Teams. Using Teams AV sensors in your environment is critical to proactively test, benchmark, and monitor network capacity, packet loss, VoIP performance, and most importantly outages. If your business uses tools like Zoom or Ring Central, deploy VoIP sensors to Azure and/or AWS to simulate and detect network packet loss, congestion, and more. While most sensors cost 1 credit, advanced multi-party AV conference sensors like Teams are 5 credits due to the ongoing maintenance and coordination effort of the Exoprise A/V bot.

After the deployment of the Teams AV sensor for synthetic transaction monitoring, the sensor interacts with Microsoft Teams by creating a conference meeting in the team’s channel and inviting the Exoprise AV bot to participate. The bot starts collecting high and low threshold WebRTC statistics and streams audio and video content into the conference that the sensor is monitoring. Collected metrics can be analyzed by IT administrators to quickly diagnose Microsoft Teams audio-video performance issues such as packet and frame loss, login and sign-in time, high latency, and round-trip time, etc.

Microsoft Teams outage on April 27 this year due to a configuration change was detected early by Exoprise sensors almost an hour before Microsoft acknowledged and released its report.

Watch our video to see how the Exoprise CloudReady monitoring tool for Microsoft Teams (web or desktop app). Proactively detect endpoint performance issues anytime anywhere and end-to-end Teams service monitoring. Get real-time status, insights, and analytics on whether Teams are down, slow, crashing, or has an outage. Optimize Teams service quality and ensure collaboration with remote workers.

Monitoring Office 365 Service Health

Extend your Microsoft 365 stack monitoring with real-time status updates and email notifications from the Office 365 communications API and Microsoft Twitter feed handle integrated into a single pane of glass. Configuring API settings and adding the widgets to CloudReady is easy and takes few minutes. Gain firsthand knowledge from Microsoft on Office 365 service restoration, status updates, and application upgrade messages during downtime. Also, read our previous blog on how to view Office 365 service health in CloudReady with three unique monitoring dashboards.

Try Our Microsoft 365 Performance Monitoring Tool

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