Today we’re announcing new tools and features for monitoring and analyzing the network performance for Office 365. These new tools expand the set of features we have for Office 365 network performance analysis that we announced in July of last year: New Office 365 Network Performance Analytics from Office365Mon. The features announced today use an updated version of our Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent to help you monitor, notify, and report on the network performance to key services. That include core network services such as DNS and proxy servers, as well as the to the public endpoints for Office 365 services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. In addition to that, we also monitor for changes in your egress point to the Internet from the different geographic locations where you install the agent.
One of the first things you may notice is that you’re now able to set up notifications for changes in your egress points when you configure the Distributed Probes feature for your subscription. Not only do we notify you when your egress location changes, we also keep a history of all of the changes at all of the locations where you’ve installed our latest agent. That allows you to go back at any point in time when you may have noticed performance issues to see if a change in egress locations may be a factor.
When you install and configure the latest version of our agent, you can set notification thresholds on a location-by-location basis so you can be alerted if network performance to the key services described above has become excessively slow. Once you install and configure the agent, these key service performance metrics are measured and monitored every time we issue health probes with the agent. All of the data is pushed back up to the cloud so you can view a number of different reports on these metrics.
We start out with service performance metrics reporting that shows you what the performance is like for each of these key services at each location where you’ve installed the latest agent, as shown here:
As with all of our charts at Office365Mon, you can easily click on items in the legend to take them off, or add them back onto the chart data. That allows you to easily drill down into the data – for example if you wanted to compare the performance of a particular service across the different locations where you’ve installed the agent.
In another report, you can look at the performance details on an agent-by-agent basis. When you do that, you can drill down into the individual service and also see the specific IP addresses that have been resolved for the service. This lets you know exactly where your requests are getting routed to, and how long each is taking to service your requests. Exchange Online tends to be particularly interesting because you will find that requests for it get spread across a wide number of distribution points, as shown here:
For both of these reports, you’re able to see these performance metrics not only for your current day health probes, but also daily as well as monthly summaries. That enables you to see your performance trends over time, as well as being able to compare your current performance to what you’ve historically experienced so you can understand fairly easily whether you are experiencing “unusual” slowness on any particular day.
As described above, you can also view the history of changes in your Internet egress point for each geographic location where you’ve installed our latest agent, as shown here:
Try It Today
These new tools are available as a Preview offering today from Office365Mon.Com. For customers that have already deployed one of our Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent, you will need to download and install the new agent to replace it. Other customers can just go straight to downloading and configuring the agent after your Office365Mon subscription is set up and ready to go. To create a new subscription for monitoring Office 365 you can begin at our web site at https://www.office365mon.com. If you already have a subscription and want to try out the new agent – which is included for FREE with ALL of our Office365Mon licenses – you can go to the Configure Distributed Probes page at https://www.office365mon.com/Configure/OnPremProbes.
These new features are another example of functionality we’ve added to the service based on requests from our customers. As I always say, we value your feedback and I personally read each and every product suggestion that comes in. I hope you will take the time to try out these new features, and we will continue to expand our service to give you as much information as can to help you Stay in the Know, and In Control, of your Office 365 subscription.
From Sunny Phoenix,
Steve
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