The (In)Complete Guide to Microsoft 365 Monitoring
Office 365 monitoring is a challenge. Traditional monitoring tools can’t see past your firewall, and the Microsoft Office 365 Service Health Dashboard has no visibility outside Microsoft’s network.
If these are the only tools you have, you’ll find yourself in the dark the next time you’re trying to figure out if there’s an outage or where the problem is. You need an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution with end-to-end visibility into the digital experience from your network to Microsoft’s cloud.
Exoprise CloudReady is the leading solution for Office 365 digital experience monitoring including Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Azure AD and MORE to detect, diagnose and fix performance issues fast.
Before Covid-19 forced 90% of our users to work from home, we had zero visibility into their user experience apart from lots of complaints. We brought in Exoprise to help us see what the real user experience was so we could objectively do something about it. Remotely deploying Exoprise to end users was a breeze, and in a short time, it helped us fix our VPN’s and helped us help end users upgrade their home networks. Now we have 360 degree visibility, fewer complaints, and when there are problems, we get SLA credits from providers faster.
Enterprise Use Cases for Office 365 Monitoring
Detect & Record Outages
Track outages by service, location and cause. Recover SLA service violations from Microsoft.
Pinpoint Network Problems
Detailed hop-by-hop performance for WAN, LAN, WiFi, SDWAN and more. Baseline reporting for your network.
Correlate Office 365 Usage
Analyze service usage, licenses and security events. Correlate with performance
Proactive Alert Notifications
Integrated Office 365 Service Communications and Twitter® feeds, one real-time console.
End-user Digital Experience
Real-time digital experience for ALL of Office 365 with synthetics and real user monitoring
Integrate with Systems
Integrate with ServiceNow, Splunk, and other systems management and ticketing solutions.
Monitor Every Application and Service in the Microsoft Office 365 Suite
SharePoint Is mission critical. Ensure SharePoint Online performance, availability and adoption from every office location.
Business relies on SharePoint services for collaboration and knowledge sharing between teams. Increase productivity by ensuring SharePoint deployments are fast and available from every location.
- Diagnose slow uploads, downloads and page response times
- Compare and benchmark SharePoint Online vs the crowd
- Synthetically test and monitor SharePoint library searches
- Pinpoint slow network access from any branch or remote office location
- Active and Passive monitoring in one platform for ALL of Office 365
Microsoft Teams is the new foundation for enterprise communications. Monitor Teams messaging, audio, video, conferencing from every angle.
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platforms like Microsoft Teams are only as good as they are fast and reliable. Dropped calls and poor audio/video quality make for frustrating employee experience and reduced productivity. Predict and reduce user complaints with comprehensive Microsoft Teams monitoring.
- Proactively detect excessive jitter, packet loss, round trip times (RTT), and AV correction rates
- Determine root cause for poor performance and outages; pinpoint network, ISP, server or client problems
- Assess network capacity for every network type; LAN, WAN, SDWAN, MPLS and WiFi
- Monitor Microsoft Teams adoption, usage, and end-to-end performance from one console
Monitor Exchange, email message queues, mailbox, and end-to-end Exchange Online performance
Email is how business communicates. Slow or stuck mail queues, poorly performing SPAM or SMTP providers, and bad Exchange networking can lead to lost business, poor user experience and dissatisfaction with IT teams. Regain visibility into Exchange health and performance with synthetic monitoring for Outlook, MAPI, OWA and Microsoft Graph API.
- Monitor, load and stress test Exchange and Exchange Online with CloudReady
- Send test emails every minute, receive replies and time and track message queues down to the millisecond
- Monitor Exchange to detect and track slow mailbox performance, mailbox usage, delivery, and access methods
- Proactively detect mailbox, CAS, router and IIS slowdowns Exchange Online from your place or ours
Monitor OneDrive, file utiilzation, upload / download bandwidth, performance and availability
Microsoft OneDrive has become the most popular file synchronization service available. OneDrive, integrated with the Office 365 application suite, has become the way employees get their work done. Track and monitor OneDrive performance and utilization in a single dashboard. Ensure the performance, uptime, availability of OneDrive for Business for any location where employees access their files.
- Monitor OneDrive operations, usage and growth over time by user, resource and location
- Test OneDrive bandwidth, Time to First Byte (TTFB) and page response times
- Diagnose network or OneDrive site slow downs and outages — reduce Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
Procatively Monitor Skype for Business using actual Skype Clients for 24x7 proactive monitoring
Skype for Business and Skype for Business Online are the backbone of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) systems. Skype for Business places high demands on the capacity, latency and speed of distributed networks so Skype should be monitored before, during and after infrastructure changes.
- Synthetically test Skype for Business using the actual Skype for Business Clients — don’t just test the server with PowerShell
- Monitor networks for excessive latency, jitter, packet and frame loss, poor MOS scores, and error correction
- Capture Call Quality in real time. Why wait days to find out a how the network is performing last week?
- Continuously assess end-to-end network QoS for changes, route and ISP failure. If your network ever changes, you want to know the effects on Skype for Business.
- Monitor Skype for Business to get real-time alert notifications about network outages, dropped calls and poor call quality
Azure AD is the central identity system of Office 365. Monitor Azure AD to ensure fast operations for all of Microsoft 365
Identity Management (IM) is the cornerstone of cloud-based eco-systems and Office 365 depends heavily on Azure AD for permissions and access control within Office 365. Exoprise CloudReady can monitor any Single Sign-on or Identity Management platform including:
- Azure AD
- Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
- Okta
- Ping Identity
- Active Directory
IM platforms are mission-critical to cloud operations and access:
- Test Azure AD, ADFS and SSO providers once a minute from any location to ensure performance and uptime
- Pinpoint the problem in the client, server, or network to reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR)
- Eliminate guesswork and finger pointing with low-level contextual data and crowd-powered bench-marking
Yammer is integral to enterprise collaboration and content sharing. Monitor Yammer to ensure that users are all on the same page.
Monitoring Yammer to detect outages and performance problems is important when you have a large team that may be sharing information and collaborating through Yammer. Especially if that team is spread out across the globe and accessing the Yammer sites from and through different network and Internet conditions.
Yammer connectivity, page loading and response times will be different in each region. The asynchronous nature of Yammer makes it better suited to larger teams so monitoring Yammer from different points-of-access behind the firewall and out in the cloud (on Exoprise — owned POPs) is important if its use has been widely adopted across an organization.
