Today is a day that we’ve been waiting on for a while. In the past 15 months we’ve been building out a pretty comprehensive service centered around monitoring SharePoint Online and Exchange Online in Office 365. Thanks to some new APIs from Microsoft, we are now happy to announce that we’re adding Skype for Business (SfB) to the suite of products you can monitor with Office365Mon.
While we’re still in preview with SfB you may notice an occasional glitch here or there, but it’s been running in our labs for well over a month now and we’ve had pretty good luck with it. It fits into the same proven architecture that Office365Mon has been using since launch. That means – as always – that we don’t ask you for a username and password to monitor SfB. You simply log in through Azure Active Directory, and when you’re done it hands off an access token to us that we can use. At this time we will be providing monitoring for Skype Presence and Skype Instant Messaging. As the scope of the APIs that Microsoft has for SfB expands, we will also expand our offering into other features of the service, such as online meetings and voice.
Although we’ve always recommended a separate service account(s) to use for monitoring Office 365, with SfB it’s really a must. Because of the way we use the APIs to check presence and instant messaging, if you try using the same account you use at work every day to monitor these services, you likely will end up with a bunch of “stuff” going on that would be quite annoying, plus it would interfere with our ability to accurately monitor the service. To that end, we recommend you use the same sort of process that we outlined in our blog post for monitoring multiple sites and mailboxes: https://samlman.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/how-to-monitor-multiple-mailboxes-and-sites-with-office365mon/. In short you will a) create a new account for monitoring, b) give it a SfB license, c) add it as an admin to your Office365Mon subscription, and d) log into Office365Mon with that account and enable the Skype for Business monitoring.
Enabling monitoring for SfB is about as simple as it gets; here’s a screenshot from the configuration page:
As you can see, all you have to do is click the Enable button to get things going – that’s it. This is also in line with how we’ve built our solutions at Office365Mon – as simple as possible, with nothing to download and install. There is one thing to remember when you click Enable the first time – you may get prompted by Azure Active Directory two times instead of the normal one, to consent to allow Office365Mon to have access to Skype resources for the account you are using for monitoring. That’s okay, it’s just because of the way the Skype team designed their service.
After that you’re off and running. We’ll automatically add the data to the reports you see for things like outages and recent health checks. You’ll also see the data show up in your My Info page next to all of the other resources we’re monitoring for you:
Finally, there is one other thing worth pointing out. Because of the way the SfB service is designed, there are times when it will be unavailable for monitoring. As we deploy monitoring for it as a Preview feature, we’re continuing to work on alternatives to minimize the alerting and configuration changes that may be needed as a result of SfB changing to an unmonitorable state. This is something that we’ll continue to work on over time, as well as await changes in the SfB architecture that will eliminate these issues.
This feature is available in Preview now for all of our customers to try. Also remember that all new customers get this along with every other feature we offer free for 90 days. So give it whirl and send your feedback our way.
From Sunny Phoenix,
Steve
Share-n-Dipity 