Office 365 Training Series: How To Monitor And Review Office 365 Services

In 2015, Wakefield Research conducted a survey on 900 global companies that generated more than $500 million in revenue. According to the study, 83% of the surveyed reps admitted to facing issues when it comes to troubleshooting in a hybrid IT environment. In order to overcome this issue, it is important that companies take the correct approach to management and make sure that their employees register in a certified office 365 course.

If you are just getting started with monitoring and reviewing office 365 services, know that not all approaches will work for you and that Microsoft has no preference about the kind of method you opt for.

To that end, let’s have a look at some of the most common approaches to monitor and review office 365 services:

Monitoring with the Help of Microsoft’s Admin Tools

Cloud services usually monitor their own data centers and you can determine the status via the Service Health dashboard. In addition to this, they allow tools such as O365 to give you the status through API. Microsoft gives its users the ability to perform additional monitoring, which helps companies in dealing with several issues.

However, the admin tools have their limitations, as they can’t tell you about the disrupted service that may affect your users. In addition to this, it doesn’t have access to your infrastructure, which includes firewall, proxies, as well as network hops. Ultimately, if there is a degradation issue, you will not be notified unless your customers complain. Sometimes, it they do issue an alert, they can’t locate the source, if the problem is at your end or at Microsoft’s, which can be a huge hassle.

Here are some third party tools that you can consider:

• Binary Tree E2E/CMT
• BitTitan MigrationWiz and accompanying tools
• Citrix Enterprise Mobility
• CodeTwo Office 365 Migration and Backup for Office 365
• ENow Mailscape
• Exoprise CloudReady Monitor
• Kaseya 365 Command
• Riverbed SteelHead SaaS
• Sangoma Express for Lync
• Sharegate

Monitoring From Data Center

This comes in handy when there are hindrances in your cloud and infrastructure connection, which is vital for your business if all your network traffic flows through the datacenters. You can use it to observe problems that exist outside of the cloud, as well as see the kind of impact that firewall and DNS has on the cloud and the datacenters. One of the issues with this approach is that it won’t help detect the problems that exist near your physical locations.

Monitoring by Analyzing Each End User’s Device

Another method that you can consider is monitoring the end user’s device. This can come in handy if you want the ability to track local metrics such as network, CPU, and memory utilization. One problem with this approach is that it can only alert you regarding a problem once it has already happened.  Furthermore, you don’t have the ability to see how the infrastructure is working between the service and the user. If you are looking for something more proactive and interactive, this may not be the right approach for you.

Monitoring From Physical Locations

If you are monitoring from a physical location, you can experience what is happening within the infrastructure. If your email system is slow, you will know that it’s a faulty email filter or an issue at Microsoft’s end. If only one of your locations is having trouble, it could be that there is an ISP problem. It is important that you invest in a well-monitoring tool, especially if you are monitoring where your users are. If you have been in the field for a long time, you will know that monitoring user’s activity will assist you in more than just network monitoring. The problem with this approach is that it can’t measure end-to-end health of the O365 services. In addition to this, it won’t test all the servers in your cloud.

Using Cloud to Monitor the Tenant

There are certain tools that work from the cloud and consistently update about the tenancy. This approach is great for you if you want quick updates regarding the issues. It will let you know even before Microsoft updates information. There are several different tools that you can use for this approach and most of them will highlight if a glitch is bothering your tenant or not.

This method will; however, not be able to tell you about the issues from the user’s perspective, which means that it will miss the problems that happen on premise. Some of the tools that are used for this approach can help you your users test all the aspects of the service, which includes working with OneDrive as well as receiving and sending emails.

The world of IT is changing with each passing day. An increasing number of companies are opting for hybrid O365 services, which is why you need to make sure your organization has the tools that can upgrade to this change.

It is highly recommended that you analyze your needs and weigh the pros and cons of each approach before investing in it.