Addressing the Office 365 Monitoring Gaps - Part 3

Today, Microsoft exposes health information about Office 365 services through the Service Health Dashboard (SHD). The information that is provided through the dashboard is only of limited use, as it focuses primarily on the overall service health instead of tenant-specific or user-specific problems. One of the limitations of the SHD is that it only gives you part of the end-to-end service view; it provides information on components that Microsoft is responsible for, but fails to monitor and report on outages caused by other components, such as your local network, Internet connection or hybrid infrastructure such as Directory Synchronization, federation health, mail flow or AD FS.

Due to the massive scale of Office 365, the dashboard almost always reports some type of issue in one of its services as, logically, there is always a problem going on somewhere. A warning in the dashboard does not necessarily mean that your tenant is affected or that some of your users are experiencing problems. Often, service issues are accompanied with vague descriptions of who might be affected, leaving the customer wondering whether an issue impacts them or not. This creates a new challenge for the administrator, as they are left with the question of whether an issue is relevant and, if it is, to what extent.

The SHD also does not send automated alert notifications. One must purposefully log on to the SHD in order to view the latest health information. As a matter of fact, Microsoft uses the number of users reading an SHD alert to help determine the scope of impact for that issue. In the past, some issues in Office 365 were directly related to an outage in Azure Active Directory, which prevented access to the SHD. This also creates a Catch-22 situation for the Service Health Dashboard: the inability to authenticate to Azure AD prevents users from getting up-to-date Service Health Information. What good is a health dashboard if you risk being locked out of it?

Microsoft has become better and faster in terms of posting outages to the SHD, unlike during a 2015 outage, when it took them nearly eight hours to acknowledge the issue in the SHD. However, it remains extremely hard for Microsoft to close the gap with external monitoring solutions, as they cannot simply post messages to the SHD prior to assessing the issue and making sure that 1) customers are affected, and 2) the appropriate message is sent, as to not create unnecessary confusion. The time between the outage happening and Microsoft being able to confidently assess the issue so that they can craft an appropriate response to the SHD creates a void for many customers. During this time, they are left to wonder whether there was an outage and, if so, whether it was affecting them. One of the most common complaints we read on Twitter is, “All my users are affected. Why isn’t this in the Service Health Dashboard?”

Azure AD Connect Health

Another useful tool Microsoft provides to help you monitor your hybrid Office 365 deployment is Azure AD Connect Health. This tool is available if you have an Azure AD Premium subscription. It is an agent-based monitoring solution which helps you gain visibility in both Azure AD Connect synchronization, AD FS and on- premises Active Directory.

The way you handle an outage is obviously different when the issue occurs within Microsoft’s data centers. In these cases, the challenge shifts to first quickly understanding conclusively, that the issue is on Microsoft’s side. The ability to do this as soon as possible is crucial because you do not want your management or users asking you if there is an issue. Finally, you can open up a ticket with Microsoft and keep your users up-to-date as to when the issue will be resolved.

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