Microsoft Teams Monitoring Now Available from Office365Mon.Com

I know that it seems like many of you have been waiting a long time for this but…we’re happy to announce that Office365Mon is now offering monitoring for Microsoft Teams!  We have just released a couple of new monitoring options for Microsoft Teams into Preview mode at Office365Mon.Com.  Our support is launching with two specific functional areas of Teams we’re monitoring – 1) the overarching Teams service, and 2) the Channels feature of Microsoft Teams, which is one of the core pillars of the platform.

To do this we’re starting with two new features, which we call Microsoft Teams Monitoring, and Microsoft Teams Advanced Monitoring.  Over time, as Microsoft adds new features to the Microsoft Teams service, we’ll roll those into our Teams monitoring packages so you can stay on top of them.  As with all the other features at Office365Mon, our goal is to make the setup and management for monitoring Microsoft teams as easy and painless as possible.  To get started, you’ll just go into our Configure Office365Mon page at https:// office365mon.com/Signup/Status, scroll down and then simply click on the Enable button in the Microsoft Teams Info section of the page.  That’s it – that’s all you need to do to get started.  Just like we do with other Office 365 services that we monitor – like SharePoint, Exchange, and OneDrive – we also give you the flexibility to focus in on a specific resource for monitoring purposes.  So we’ll go out and get a list of all the Microsoft Teams you are joined to, and then you can pick which one you want to use as we start monitoring it.

We also simplify the process of configuring monitoring, in that you don’t have to go pick which Teams, and Channels to monitor – just clicking the Enable button is enough to get you started.  After that, if you have both Microsoft Teams monitoring features, then we’ll monitor both Teams and Channels; if you only have one, then we’ll just monitor Teams.  We figure that out for you so you don’t have to hassle with it.

From a reporting standpoint, Microsoft Teams data then begins to automatically show up in reports, just like any other Office 365 resources.  So you don’t need to go find special reports just for Microsoft Teams, because the Teams monitoring data shows up with all of the reports you already know and love.  We’re also able to do more in-depth analysis of your Microsoft Teams performance as well, meaning as we look at the performance for your Teams tenant, we can break down where time is spent in processing requests.  Is it happening in your tenant itself, so there is slowness in the cloud?  Or is there perhaps a performance issue on your network as your users utilize the Teams feature sets.  Here’s a quick look at one of the reports from our Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent – it ALSO now includes support for Microsoft Teams so you can see what the Teams performance is like across all of the different geographic locations where you have users:

You’ll also see data from Teams now integrated into our Tenant Performance and Health reports.  This is one that we’ve recently updated so that it shows you not only the tenant-level performance of the recent health probes that have been issued, but it also has an underlay that displays the historical data for the same point in time as when you are viewing the report.  So if you’re looking at the report at 2PM on a Thursday, then you’ll see historically what the performance has been like at 2PM on a Thursday so you know if your current performance is in line with what you normally see, or if you’ve hit a performance issue in your tenant.  Here’s an example of that:

Also, just like many of the other services we monitor, you can also compare what the overall performance is like for your Teams tenant versus all other Office365Mon customers that are monitoring Microsoft Teams.  Here’s what that looks like:

Start Monitoring Teams Today

As we do every time we release a new feature, we’ve enabled Microsoft Teams and Teams Channel monitoring for all existing Office365Mon customers.  You just need to go to the Configure Office365Mon page at https://www.office365mon.com/Signup/Status and click the Enable button in the Microsoft Teams Info section.  Once you do that, you’ll be able to see Teams performance data begin to show up in the reports mentioned above along with several others.  You’ll also get notifications when we detect an outage with your Microsoft Teams service.

For new customers, we turn on Microsoft Teams monitoring along with all of our other features for free for 90 days when you create a trial subscription.  Just visit our site at https://office365mon.com and click on the big Start Now link on the home page.  We don’t require any payment information up front, so you can be up and running in about two minutes to monitor Office 365.

As I always say, if you have feedback on this feature or any other feature you would like to see, please do not hesitate to contact me.  You can always email us at support@office365mon.com, and be assured that I read each and every feature feedback and suggestion we get through there.

I hope you’ll find our new Microsoft Teams monitoring features to be a welcome addition to the wide array of monitoring services we offer here at Office365Mon.Com.

From Sunny Phoenix,

 

Steve

New Office 365 Network Performance Tools from Office365Mon.Com

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

 

Office365Mon Launches New “Private” Offering for Large Enterprises, CSPs and US Government Organizations

Today we are announcing the release of a new offering from Office365Mon.Com called “Office365Mon Private”.  With this offering you can get your own private instance of the Office365Mon.Com monitoring service for Office 365 deployed to your own Azure subscription.  This brings with it several advantages for large enterprises, CSPs, and US Government organizations that check all of the important boxes:

• Because you have all of the data and monitoring in your own private subscription, we use an alternative method for connecting to your resources that no longer requires you to update our access to them once every three months. Instead, you set it up once, and you never have to touch it again.
• We automatically inventory all of your SharePoint and OneDrive for Business sites, and Exchange mailboxes, and we do monitoring randomly against all of them, without any additional configuration required by you.
• We can provide performance data across all of your various sites and mailboxes, no matter what geographical region they are located in. This becomes even more important as Microsoft expands support for geographically distributed SharePoint Online sites.
• Office365Mon Private is now the only offering where you can get our new Log Shipping feature. This feature allows you to capture all of your SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business activity logs, and store them for as many months as you like.  Microsoft only stores a couple of months worth of logs, but most enterprise and government organizations require longer retention periods for things like compliance, auditing, record keeping, lawsuit discovery, etc.
• Especially for CSPs, you can easily add as many additional tenants to monitor as you like. We provide deployment management tools in Office365Mon Private that allows you to create new subscriptions, create custom licensing plans, move customers between different licensing plans, etc.
• For US Government organizations – we are now set up in the US Government deployment of Microsoft Azure! That means we can now help you deploy Office365Mon Private to the US Government deployment of Azure, and you can have your own private instance of Office365Mon running for your tenant in there.
• For all customers, you can easily have Office365Mon Private deployed to any Azure data center anywhere in the world, in whatever region you require.
• As we add additional features to our existing Office365Mon.Com service, we will roll them out as applicable and make them available to Office365Mon Private customers as well.

 

Getting It Set Up

Getting things set up with Office365Mon Private is extremely easy.  Our engineers will work with your organization to set up a short one- to two-week project where we deploy it to your Azure subscription.  We’ll make sure everything is set up and configured, and verify that all services are working before we turn it over to you.  After we do that, you’re free to operate it as you choose, but you can rest easy knowing that we are available to assist you should you encounter any issues or have any questions.

 

Using the New Features

Here are just some of the important new features that deserve a little more attention.

Tools for Monitoring Multiple Tenants

When you want to monitor multiple Office 365 tenants, such as if you’re a CSP, you’ll find several tools to help you do that with the new Subscription Management page.  Here you can create and delete subscriptions, get a list of all of the subscriptions you’re monitoring; add, modify or delete any custom licensing plans, and more.

For example, here you can see how easy it is to create a new customer subscription:

If you want to create or modify a custom licensing plan, you can pick and choose from all of the available features we have in Office365Mon Private, including Threat Intelligence Monitoring and Log Shipping:

You can also do things like customize the “FROM” email address that’s used when notifications are sent out, as well as run your own custom code or tasks once a day after our daily processing jobs are completed.

 

Managing Access to Monitored Resources

With Office365Mon Private, you no longer have to go in once every three months and update the Azure access tokens that are used for monitoring.  Instead, we’ll help you set up a certificate that will be used to provide access to the resources we’re going to monitor.  As you can see from the Private Deployment configuration page, it’s a simple three-step process:

Our engineers will walk you through this during your initial deployment, and then are available to answer questions if you are going to set up monitoring for other Office 365 tenants as well.

 

Pricing and Availability

Office365Mon Private pricing is based on the number of resources you have to monitor – mailboxes, SharePoint and OneDrive sites.  The less you have, the less you pay; the more you have, the more you pay.  You can get complete details, including an estimate based on the size of your organization, by emailing private@office365mon.com.

Office365Mon Private is available today!  If you’ve seen Office365Mon before and are interested in just the new Private features and how you use them, then you can contact us at demos@office365mon.com and we’ll be happy to show you how these new tools and features work.  If you’ve never seen Office365Mon before and want to see all of the features, insights, and reports that are available to you with both the current service and Office365Mon Private, then email us at demos@office365mon.com and we will arrange a demo for you.  You can also always go to our site at https://www.office365mon.com to see what’s there for yourself, as well as start up a free 90-day trial of our service.

Office365Mon Private provides some genuinely unique, interesting and exciting monitoring options for enterprises, CSPs and US Government organizations.  We hope you’ll take a few minutes to consider the value that Office 365 monitoring brings to help you stay In the Know, and In Control of your Office 365 services.

From Sunny Phoenix,

 

Steve

 

New Centralized Office 365 Storage Monitoring from Office365Mon.Com

Today we’re announcing the release of a new centralized storage monitoring feature for Office 365 resources.  In addition to that, as part of this same feature we are providing Office 365 usage information trends across your tenant over a rolling 52-week year.

Our new feature is called Usage Monitoring.  In Office 365 today, when resources get close to their allocated storage, notifications can be sent to the resource owner.  For example, when you reach a certain percentage of your allocated storage for a SharePoint site or OneDrive for Business site, the site collection admins can get email notifications.  With Exchange Online, the mailbox owner can get a notification when they reach their mailbox’s Issue Quota Warning storage level.  There isn’t the capability though to keep your company administrators connected to all of these events when resource storage reaches critical levels.  This is important because when individual users get these messages, the first thing they normally do is call the help desk and escalate the situation into something much more urgent than it needs to be.

With Usage Monitoring from Office365Mon.Com, we’ve made it super simple to set up centralized notifications for these events.  You simply tell us what types of storage you want us to monitor – Exchange, SharePoint sites, and/or OneDrive sites – and then you tell us at what percentage of the allocated storage you want us to notify you.  You can see the configuration options below:

Once configured, any time any resource in your organization reaches these levels we’ll send out emails to everyone that you’ve included for notification in your Office365Mon subscription.  In addition to that, we also send out a webhook notification that includes the type of resource that has triggered the notification, along with a list of all the resources that are exceeding the configured amount.  Like many of our features at Office365Mon.Com, this keeps you In the Know and In Control so you can get in front of these situations before they become a problem!

In addition to letting you know when you’re hitting storage limits, you also get several reports that fill you in on what services your users are using.  We also have several reports that will give you trend information around what sort of activities and with what frequency they are using them within the major services.  For example, you can see how many active users you’re getting per week in each of the major Office 365 services:

You can see the message activity from Exchange:

The feature usage within Skype for Business:

As well as the adoption rate of Microsoft Teams features:

In addition to this, we also create reports for the Top 100 SharePoint sites, Top 100 OneDrive for Business sites, and Top 100 Mailboxes.  The resources are ordered by the amount of storage they are consuming.  By updating the report data once a week, you can easily spot trends that are occurring in usage and adoption of the different services and features in your Office 365 subscription.

The Usage Monitoring feature is included with the Enterprise Platinum license from Office365Mon.Com.  Existing customers can take advantage of this new set of features today.  New customers who are interested in this or other features of Office365Mon can go to our web site at https://www.office365mon.com and click the big Start Now link on the home page to begin a free 90-day trial.  We don’t ask for any payment information up front, so you can just go right in and start creating your new Office365Mon subscription to try out all of the amazing features of the service.

As always, we’d love to hear any feedback you have on this feature, or suggestions for new ways to support your needs with Office 365.  I personally read every single suggestion that comes into our support@office365mon.com mailbox, so let us know what you think!

From Sunny Phoenix,

 

Steve

 

New Geo Aware Alerts for Office 365 Outages Available Now from Office365Mon.Com

Today we launched a new feature that is available to all Office365Mon customers.  We call this feature “Geo Aware Alerts”, and it’s yet another way we help keep you aware of what’s happening in the Office 365 ecosystem.  In this case, it’s rather like crowdsourcing Office 365 outage information.  The way it works is, you can configure your Office365Mon subscription to alert you when other Office365Mon customers within a specific distance from your users start experiencing an outage.  You get to define what that distance is and whether it’s measured in miles or kilometers.  Then, you can go install our Distributed Probes agent in all of the different geographic locations where you have users.  When you install the agent, it captures the physical location where it’s being installed.

Now, whenever another customer’s Distributed Probe agent detects an outage, if that agent is within that specific distance of one or more of your agents, you’ll get notified that an outage has started nearby.  This can be important because Office 365 outages aren’t always the fault of Office 365.  As we monitor Office 365 we see that sometimes they happen when there are regional Azure Active Directory issues, localized network or ISP issues, etc.  Being aware of a local issue can help you keep in front of trouble before it becomes a bigger problem for your users, or worse yet, catches you unaware that there’s any problems going on at all.  As you can see from the picture below, we already have customers with the Distributed Probe agent installed all over the world:

That’s all part of our motto at Office365Mon – Stay in the Know, and Stay in Control.  Geo Aware Alerts are another way we help you do just that.  To start using this feature, you can visit our site at https://www.office365mon.com and go to the Configure Office 365 Distributed Probes page at https://www.office365mon.com/Configure/OnPremProbes.  From there you can configure when you want Geo Aware Alerts to fire, as well as download the Distributed Probes agent.  If you’ve already installed the Distributed Probes agent you don’t need to get a new version to take advantage of this feature.  However, you do need to run the Configuration utility for it again in each location where you’ve installed an agent.  You don’t need to change anything – just clicking the Save button will capture your agent’s location information for the Geo Aware Alerts feature.

From Sunny Phoenix,

Steve

New Office 365 Network Performance Analytics from Office365Mon

One of the most commonly requested features we’ve had from our customers at Office365Mon has been something to help them better understand network performance with their Office 365 tenants.  Today we’re happy to announce that we have released a set of services, tools and reports to do just that.  You can breakdown the performance of your Office 365 tenant between what’s happening in the tenant itself versus the network transport of your requests.  You can compare what the network performance is like to your Office 365 tenant from the different geographies where you have users.  You can also set notification thresholds, so you can be alerted when network performance at any location becomes unsatisfactory.

We rolled out the first part of this suite of services in June, with support for monitoring tenant Health Scores and farm processing times for SharePoint Online and One Drive for Business.  We’ve extended that model now to include the following:

• Set notification thresholds for network performance times from cloud-based probes
• Set notification thresholds for network performance times from every geographic location where you install our Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent
• Capture network performance metrics for all cloud-based as well as Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agents
• Monitor One Drive for Business – as well as SharePoint Online and Exchange Online – with the new version of our Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent

With these new features turned on, we’ll monitor and capture tenant- and network-specific performance metrics with each health probe we issue for SharePoint Online and One Drive for Business.  This, coupled with our other performance and availability data, gives you a very clear picture of when and where problems or potential problems may be happening throughout your organization.  That helps you understand where bottlenecks are happening as they occur and gives you the insight needed to focus your resources where they can best be utilized.

Here’s a real-world example that occurred during an early release of these services.  Notifications were sent out for a tenant from multiple Distributed Probe agents in different geographies because the roundtrip time for the health probe exceeded the limits that had been set.  However, the network performance alerts did not fire, which meant that network transportation time was within limits even though the overall roundtrip time was not.  Looking at the reports in our Advanced Report gallery, you could also see that during this same time the tenant processing times had spiked.  In addition to that, the Health Scores of the tenants also were spiking (the higher the Health Score, the less healthy the tenant is considered to be, ironically).  By looking at these data points we could tell that in this instance the performance issue was all as a result of a bottleneck in the Office 365 tenant itself, not in the network.  That meant that there was no need for us to spend resources trying to evaluate our network, run diagnostics there, try to identify bottlenecks in it, etc. – in short, saving us a whole bunch of time and money.

In addition to the notification aspect, once these tools are up and running for your Office365Mon subscription, there are a number of interesting reports to look at.  One of the really interesting ones compares the network performance at different geographies, at different times of day:

Here we can see the network performance from each of these locations, in 15-minute increments of the day.  The report is based on a 30-day rolling set of data, so you can see at a larger view how each location is doing relative to one another.  Also, you can also spot at a glance if you commonly have certain times of days, even if it only happens in certain locations, where your network performance is problematic.

Another similar slice of this data is to view it by day of the week:

Again, many customers complain that on certain days of the week performance is worse than others.  These reports give you an ability to identify just such situations, also on a geo-by-geo basis.

Breaking down tenant processing times versus network transportation times is also done quite easily with other new reports we’ve released.  For example, here is one of the reports mentioned above, that lets you get the tenant processing times as well as Health Scores, broken down by SharePoint Online versus One Drive for Business.  This is also an important difference to highlight because we have seen performance differences between the two services:

If you’re concerned about performance differences between SharePoint Online and One Drive for Business, we can also break that down further yet and show you what the performance is like for each, broken down by each geography where you have installed the Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent:

Finally, you can also get a comparison of the amount of time requests are spending on tenant processing, versus network transportation – and, you can get that also broken down by each geography where health probes are being issued:

One of the other incredibly useful things about all of our charts, is that you can simply click on items in the legend to remove them, or add them back in, to any chart.  So if you want to do some drill down and compare 2 or 3 or however many different geos to each other you can do that.  Or compare a particular service across locations.  The ways in which you can slice, dice and analyze this data is extensive and incredibly useful as you analyze and work to maximize your connectivity with Office 365.

 

It’s Turned On – Go Use It!

The core health score, tenant performance, and network performance for our cloud-based probes are turned on for everyone, so go use them!  Notification thresholds for performance issues with tenant or network performance can be managed by going to the Configure Office365Mon page on our site at https://www.office365mon.com.  The new network performance and One Drive for Business monitoring features of the Distributed Probes and Diagnostics agent is also available immediately for all customers that are licensed to use this feature.  It does require you to download the latest version of our agent from the Configure Distributed Probes page on our site.  If you already have an agent installed, you’ll need to uninstall it and then install the latest version.

 

Stay in the Know, Stay in Control

These services, tools, and reports all fit in perfectly with our mantra of Stay in the Know, Stay in Control.  You’ll have amazing insights into the breakdown of performance across geographies with your Office 365 tenant, ensuring that you can deliver top quality service to your users.  I hope you’ll try it out and, as always, send any feedback or other ideas to us.  We love to hear them and incorporate as many of them as possible into our service.

From Sunny Phoenix,

 

Steve

Office365Mon Launches New Features for Storing Office 365 Logs and Monitoring Health Scores and Request Times

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

 

 

Monitoring Geographically Distributed Office 365 Tenants at Office365Mon.Com

One of the questions we see from time to time is around where and how we monitor Office 365, and what all gets monitored.  In a nutshell, what we deliver out of the box is monitoring from a set of Azure cloud services, that will then go and do performance and availability monitoring of your Office 365 tenant, where ever those resources may be.

In terms of what gets monitored, that really boils down to “how many” of a particular resource type are we going to watch for you.  Some people have misconceptions around that, thinking that they may want to monitor every single SharePoint site, or every single mailbox, in an entire organization.  While some companies may have used solutions like that when all of their services were on premises, that is a model that doesn’t really make sense when the data is hosted in the cloud.  The reasons why, and the way we DO look at ensuring coverage for a tenant, dovetails nicely into a broader conversation about “how do we do that” when you have parts of your tenant distributed geographically.

To begin with, let’s talk a little bit about why you really don’t need, want, or even should try monitoring every single resource in your tenant.  Here are a few of the most obvious reasons:

• Security – in order to monitor a resource, you need to have access to the resource. Opening up your tenant and granting access to your entire corporate email and document repository set to a monitoring service (or any application for that matter) is about as bad an idea as you’ll come by.  This is how data gets leaked people.
• Signal overload – over time, you’ll see many short, transient errors with your cloud resources. It doesn’t mean the service or even your tenant is going down; it’s just the nature of life on the Internet.  If you try and wade through tens, hundreds or thousands of these signals a day, you’ll be worn out probably before your first coffee break.  You need to be able to establish an appropriate cross section of your service offering to sample, not gorge yourself on data.
• Necessity – frankly, it just isn’t necessary. What I’ve seen from my many years working at Microsoft, and then subsequently at Office365Mon, is that you will get an excellent view of the health of your tenant by monitoring one to a few resources based on data center.  For example, in most cases (but not all), if one SharePoint site is up, they are ALL up.  It’s incredibly rare to have only one or two site collections within a tenant down and all the others up, or vice versa.  With Exchange it’s a lot of the same thing – while it’s more likely there that you may randomly have issues with one or two mailboxes now and again, in most cases when one mailbox is up within a data center, they’re all up; when one is down, they’re all down.  Again, this is not true in all cases (and Exchange itself has some other factors based on its architecture that can contribute to more of these outages than SharePoint), but it’s a good general rule to follow.

So how does that pertain to monitoring geographically distributed Office 365 resources?  Like this – today, Exchange can have mailboxes for a single tenant split between different data centers.  In the future, SharePoint Online will support having different segments of its service split across multiple data centers.  For more details on what’s happening with SharePoint Online in this respect, see this TechNet article:  Multi-Geo Capabilities in OneDrive and SharePoint Online in Office 365.   At Office365Mon, we tackle this in a couple of different ways:

1. Cloud probes – when your data is split across multiple data centers, create multiple Office365Mon subscriptions. With each subscription we can target a different resource or resources in the different geographic locations where you have resources.  All of our licenses at Office365Mon support having multiple subscriptions; for more details see our Pricing page.  By pulling a representative resource or two from each different data center and configuring Office365Mon subscriptions to monitor them, we can track all of your data centers with our cloud-based probes.
2. Distributed Probes – we also have a feature that you can download and install locally called Distributed Probes and Diagnostics. This can be installed on as many different devices in as many different locations as you want.  So you can install the agent on different physical or virtual machines that are in or near the same regions where your Office 365 resources are at.  Each of these devices issues health probes from the location at which it’s installed, and then it “reports back” with both performance and availability data so you can keep track of what’s happening with your Office 365 tenant worldwide.

When you start breaking down your monitoring plan by mapping it to the geographic regions in which you have data, and then matching that to Office365Mon subscriptions and Distributed Probes, you can pretty easily and pretty quickly develop and deploy your Office 365 monitoring in a way that will keep you in the know and in the control, no matter how big your organization is.  As always, the first step is to create your Office365Mon subscription, which you can do at https://www.office365mon.com.  The first 90 days is free and you don’t need to provide any payment information up front.  You can continue to add additional subscriptions during your trial period and map out a workable, sensible monitoring strategy.

As always, we love to hear feedback so if you have questions feel free to shoot them to our support staff at support@office365mon.com.

From Sunny Phoenix,

Steve

 

Expanding Coverage for Malware Monitoring to SharePoint Online and OneDrive from Office365Mon.Com

Today we released the next phase of our Threat Intelligence monitoring features at Office365Mon.Com.  Office 365 monitoring has been a staple of ours at Office365Mon.Com for a number of years now, and recently we’ve expanded it to take advantage of the new Threat Intelligence capabilities provided to Office 365 E5 license holders.  Our initial offering included support for threats that were delivered via email to Office 365 customers.

As explained in our initial blog post here: https://samlman.wordpress.com/2017/12/04/stay-informed-with-new-malware-monitoring-from-office365mon-com/, the Threat Intelligence monitoring we’ve launched already allows you to do things like get notified the first time a new malware is sent to your organization, when you get more than a certain number of malware within a given time period, and when any user gets more than a certain number of malware in any given day.  All of that monitoring and alerting has been based on malware that arrives via email.  Today, we’re adding support for monitoring malware threats in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.  By adding these additional services, you can be assured that when your monitoring Office 365, you’ll also be kept aware of when and where malware shows up in virtually all of the primary repositories in your Office 365 tenant.

In addition to the notification options described above, we’ve added a new one one that’s designed specifically for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business – alerting you when any individual user uploads and/or shares an excessive number of malware infected files in any given day.  You decide what an “excessive” number is, and we do the rest.  As always, configuration is incredibly simple for these features, as shown here:

Every time any user uploads an excessive number of items, you’ll be given a notification along with details around who is responsible.  That allows you to take quick action in case one of your users’ devices has been compromised or they are otherwise unaware that they have pushed malware infected items into your Office 365 tenant.  You’ll get the information you need to focus your efforts on the individuals who are having the most difficulties so you can lock things down and disinfect their devices.

We’ve also rolled this data into several of our existing Threat Intelligence monitoring reports, as well as adding some new ones too.  Here’s a look at all of the Threat Intelligence related reports in our Advanced Report gallery; the one’s highlighted in green are existing reports that now contain additional data from SharePoint and OneDrive; the one highlighted in purple contains a set of new reports just for malware found in SharePoint and OneDrive.

When you view the Other SharePoint Threats report, there are actually a number of different ways to view data points about the malware that’s made it into your tenant:

• By author, or the person that uploaded the infected item
• By site, so you know which sites are most problematic for having infected materials sent to them
• By malware family, so you can see which types of malware are making their way into SharePoint and OneDrive for Business most frequently
• By file type, so you can see which types of files are getting infected most frequently and then subsequently working their way into your tenant

You’re really getting a comprehensive view of your tenant when monitoring Office 365 with Office365Mon.Com.  The new release today further broadens the multitude of ways in which we keep you in the know and in control of your Office 365 tenant.

You can try out our new and improved Threat Intelligence monitoring features by visiting us at https://www.office365mon.com.  If don’t have an Office365Mon subscription yet, you can create one for free for 90 days with all of these features turned on.  We never ask for any payment information up front, so you can just click on the big Start Now link on the home page and get started.  If you’re an existing Office365Mon customer, just go to the Configure Threat Intelligence Monitoring page for your subscription at https://www.office365mon.com/Configure/Threats.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback on this or any other features, please reach out to our support team at support@office365mon.com.

From Sunny Phoenix,

 

Steve

 

Stay Informed with New Malware Monitoring from Office365Mon.Com

It seems like organizations of all types and sizes are under digital attack these days.  Using email to transmit malware and then compromise an organization is a common way in which these kinds of attacks strike.  Today Office365Mon is launching a new service to help keep you in the know of when and where these attacks are directed at your organization.  In conjunction with the Threat Intelligence features of Office 365, we have a new feature we call Threat Intelligence Monitoring.

The Threat Intelligence features in Office 365 are included for those users that have an E5 license.  The Office 365 E5 license includes numerous additional features beyond the basic email and SharePoint, and Threat Intelligence is one of them.  The Threat Intelligence feature in Office 365 is a collection of insights used in analyzing your tenant to help you find and eliminate threats, proactively.  The Threat Intelligence Monitoring feature in Office365Mon builds on that in some important ways.  For example, you can:

• Get notified the first time a new malware is sent to your organization. Know when a new type of malware has been targeted at your company so you can make sure you have the tools and plans in place to defend yourself.
• Get notified when you get more than a certain number of malware within a given time period. Set thresholds for malware volume so you know if you are being targeted for broader malware attacks.
• Get notified when any user gets more than a certain number of malware in any given day. Be in the know and in control if any of your users are being singled out and specifically targeted with malware attacks so you quarantine and limit the potential damage.

Configuring these options, like all features in Office365Mon, is super simple.  A few mouse clicks and you are ready to go:

Once configured, you’ll have all of the standard Office365Mon notification options to keep you in the know when there’s a problem:  email messages, text messages, and our webhook feature.  In addition to the notifications, there are a number of interesting reports that we provide with Threat Intelligence Monitoring to help you analyze the nature of these attacks against your organization.

For example, here you can get the trend of malwares entering your organization during the current month:

In addition to the trend for the current month, there’s a similar chart that shows you a rolling two-month period so you can see what’s being targeted at you over a longer period of time.

You can also get an overview of the top 10 targeted users within your organization, so you can ensure that they are following security best practices:

There’s other reports that show you both for the current month as well as historically, data for different ways in which malware has been targeted at your organization.  For example, here’s one that shows the different malware file names that were sent into your organization:

In addition to this, you can view this kind of summary data based on who sent malware infected messages, summaries of the Senders’ IP address, summaries based on the email Subject so you can look for patterns there, summaries on file type and file name as shown above, and also information on when the malware was detected.

We’re also taking this information and have added it into our Microsoft Cloud Command Center.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Cloud Command Center brings together information that previously existed as islands of data and loaded up all of the key metrics that you need about everything that’s going on with your Microsoft cloud services.  We’ve plugged in the malware trend report and user targeting report into the Cloud Command Center for a really great overview of the health of your organization and its cloud services:

We think features like Threat Intelligence Monitoring really expand and strengthen the base of important information you need to be in the know and in control of your organization and its cloud software services.  It all starts in Office 365, so you can help yourself get connected with this information by incorporating the E5 license in your organization.

The Threat Intelligence Monitoring service in Office365Mon is available in Preview today for everyone.  As with all new Office365Mon features, all existing customers have had this feature turned on for the next 90 days to try it out.  All new Office365Mon customers will also have this feature enabled for 90 days so they can see it working in their environment.  As always, we would still love to get feedback on how we can improve it and make it more useful to you, so please feel free to send it our way.  Licensing and pricing is not yet available for the Threat Intelligence Monitoring service; that will be set in Q1 of 2018.

We really have a wide and expansive set of tools to help you with your Microsoft cloud services now.  For monitoring Office 365 performance and availability, go to https://office365mon.com.  For monitoring Azure performance and availability, go to https://azureservicemon.com.  To monitor malware attacks using Threat Intelligence, go Office365Mon.Com and create your Office365Mon subscription, then you can configure Threat Intelligence monitoring at https://www.office365mon.com/Configure/Threats.

Thanks, and I hope everyone has a great holiday season!

From Sunny Phoenix,

Steve