One of the things that we’ve done from day one when monitoring Office 365 is to let you know if your Exchange mailboxes are working or not. While that’s an absolute necessity and quite valuable, it still left part of the story untold – until now. One of the things we heard from customers is “my mailbox seems fine, but I sent an email 30 minutes ago and it hasn’t arrived yet”. Or “I was told they sent me an email a couple of hours ago but I haven’t seen it yet”. For those that have witnessed this behavior before, you know that sometimes email gets stuck in transit. Your mailbox may be working fine, but if messages aren’t going out or coming in, then it can be a real problem.
At Office365Mon.Com, we’re addressing this with our new Email Transport Monitoring feature. The Email Transport Monitoring feature lets you monitor both outbound messages – those that you send – and inbound messages – those that you receive. You can set a delivery time for each direction, and if our health probe messages don’t arrive within that timeframe, we’ll send you a notification. Like all of our other notifications at Office365Mon, that can be emails, text messages, and/or our webhook service.
Configuring monitoring for your email transport is incredibly simple. Go to our web site and start here: https://www.office365mon.com/Configure/EmailTransport. This is a screenshot:
It’s pretty simple – if you want us to monitor email transport, just check the box and tell us how long to wait before notifying you when a message doesn’t show up. If you don’t check the box, then we won’t monitor it for you.
Once we’ve started monitoring it for you, there are some very nice reports you get. To begin with, you’ll see the message delivery times for everything we’ve been monitoring over the previous 12 hours:
In addition to that, you get monthly summary numbers so you can see what your delivery times have been:
Also, we have a report that shows you every message that was so slow it triggered a notification, so you can always review the history of when you had issues. In addition, you will see email transport performance information rolled up into our Power BI reports. The raw data for these reports is also available for download from our site if you have the Report Data feature enabled, and you can also programmatically retrieve it via our reporting REST API.
This is another in a long line of customer suggested features we’ve implemented. Like the others, it’s a super scalable cloud-only monitoring feature that doesn’t require you to install any software, anywhere. It’s available today as a Preview feature on our site at http://www.office365mon.com. Just go to the Configure menu and click on Email Transport Monitoring – then check the boxes for the directions you wish to monitor. All customers get this feature free to try for 90 days so check it out and let us know what you think. After 90 days you can get this feature with our new Enterprise Platinum license. See our site at https://www.office365mon.com/Products/Pricing for more details on pricing.
As always, thanks so much for all of the great suggestions. We listen and continue to build on your needs.
From Sunny Phoenix,
Steve
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