Today we are announcing the Preview availability of two new features at Office365Mon, both targeted at SharePoint Online (SPO) and One Drive for Business (ODB) in Office 365. The first is our enterprise Log Shipping feature, which creates a copy of the log files of all your activity in SPO and ODB and will store up to 12 months’ worth of these logs for you, as well as provide some basic reporting on them. The second is our Health Score feature, which provides Office 365 monitoring of health scores for your specific SPO and ODB tenant, as well as the processing time – just within your tenant – of each monitored probe we send. This gives you a bird’s eye view of the performance in your tenant, without the extra baggage of networks, Internet congestion, ISP issues, etc.
Log Shipping
The Log Shipping feature is used in conjunction with our Threat Intelligence Monitoring feature. As part of that, we capture all of the log entries that Microsoft generates for the activity on your SPO and ODB tenants. You can then store these log files for up to 12 months and have that data available for download to deal with any kind of compliance, auditing, or other evidentiary needs of your tenant’s activity. Once it’s turned on, we also provide some basic analytic reports of the data they contain. That includes things like the top 10 most active sites, top 10 operations (like file download, upload, search, etc.), most active users, the browsers that are being used, and an operation trends report. The trends report shows you which operations are being performed month over month so you can see which activities are trending up and down, as shown here:
The Log Shipping feature has gone through two beta cycles at Office365Mon and is now ready for general consumption as a Preview feature. During the beta we had the opportunity to validate the solution against a wide variety of tenants and organizations, from relatively small to extremely large. We’ve captured logs up to several gigabytes in size and have successfully stored and downloaded all of them, so it can easily scale to meet the needs of any size organization. The Log Shipping feature will be included with our Enterprise Platinum with Threat Intelligence Monitoring license.
Monitoring Health Scores
For those of you familiar with SharePoint on premises, you may be familiar with SharePoint health scores and request durations. These are values that SharePoint embeds in each request you make that gives you metrics on the performance health of your farm. SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business in Office 365 contain these same metrics, and we are now capturing that performance data for ALL Office365Mon subscriptions. The health score is a value between 0 and 10 that represents the overall health of your tenant, where 0 is the healthiest, and 10 is the worst. For example, if the farm is under duress from load or some other performance problem, then the health score will steadily increase. The request duration tells you how long the farm itself took to process your request. That allows you to eliminate all of the other transportation-related overhead when looking at the performance of your tenant. With that out of the way, you can view the performance of your tenant in processing the Office 365 monitoring probes we issue and understand when there are issues, if there are certain times of day when performance declines, or even certain days of the week. We provide reporting data on these metrics for the current day, day over day for each month, and month over month. Here’s an example of a current snapshot of this performance data from our tenant:
In addition, you can also set up notifications when the health score or request duration for your tenant exceeds a particular value. It’s now part of where you configure your Office365Mon subscription, as shown here:
This feature is also in preview, and as mentioned above, is included with ALL of our Office365Mon licenses.
Try It Today!
These features are available for you to try today. Health Score monitoring is automatically turned on for all new and current Office365Mon customers. Log Shipping is available for current customers with the Enterprise Platinum with Threat Intelligence Monitoring license, and is also included with our 90-day trial subscription for new customers. To get a trial license simply visit us at https://office365mon.com and click the big Start Now button on the home page.
We hope you’ll take these features for a spin and let us know what you think. Both of these features are another example of feedback we’ve taken directly from you, our customers, and incorporated into the product. Please keep it coming, we love to deliver on your Office 365 monitoring needs.
From Sunny Phoenix,
Steve
Share-n-Dipity 