How Office365Mon’s Monitoring Services Got Me a Refund on my SharePoint Online Bill

One of the original goals I always had for Office365Mon was the hope that at some point it should be able to monitor enough outages to qualify me for a refund on my Office 365 monthly charges.  For those of you who aren’t familiar, Office 365 has a guaranteed uptime service level agreement (SLA) of 99.9%.  When the availability is less than that you are entitled to a refund.  The exact amount of the refund varies based on how long your service was unavailable, among other things.  For complete details on Microsoft’s SLA you should visit this link:  http://microsoftvolumelicensing.com/DocumentSearch.aspx?Mode=3&DocumentTypeId=37 and download the document for your language.

In my case, the dream became reality last weekend when I got both email and text notifications from Office365Mon that my SharePoint Online site was down.  It’s not uncommon to get these notifications but they’re generally fairly short lived and since I’ve started Office365Mon Microsoft has done a good job with its availability.  This time though I got the initial notice that an outage had started…but I wasn’t getting a subsequent notice that it had ended.  Finally, about two hours later (126 minutes to be exact) I got the notification that the outage had ended.  A quick check on the number of minutes in the month of April left me realizing that my up time for April had dropped below 99.9%; I was at 99.7%, which meant that I should be entitled to a 25% refund of my monthly charges.

Armed with the info that Office365Mon had been continuously checking the site roughly every minute or two that entire time, I opened a service request in my Office 365 admin portal on Saturday and today was happy to receive an email from them confirming that they are in fact refunding 25% of my charges for April.  Here’s a copy of the email, with certain names and details redacted out to protect the innocent.  🙂

For those of you who end up using Office365Mon for this same purpose, take note of these three questions you will need to answer to get a refund:

1. Provide the specific details about the issue and how you have been affected?
2. When did the issue happen? From when to when (Time and Date)
3. What are the services were affected?

Again, one of the really cool things about this is that I got the info I needed for my refund with the Office 365 monitoring features of Office365Mon.  Free to try for 90 days, check it out and stay on top of your tenant as well!  Just go to https://www.office365mon.com to start your free trial.