Office 365 Digital Experience Monitoring Crucial to Enterprise Productivity - Part 1

Jason Lieblich

Office 365 Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is critical to most every enterprise these days. Why? It's clear Microsoft 365 is winning when it comes to collaboration and productivity with more innovation, polish and features than other platforms. Most enterprises are dependent on Office 365.


Office 365 Growth and Adoption

Office 365 and its corresponding cloud services, Azure, Office Apps and everything in between has grown to be the leader. Some of the latest figures for Office 365 and Azure growth:

■ 200 Million Active Daily Users — A staggering number! On Microsoft's FY20 Q1 earnings call on October 23 (link to call transcript), they updated the number from the previous 180 million in April 2019 to 200 million. These are numbers that make every SaaS vendor jealous!

■ Office 365 revenue growth at 36% YoY, weaker than Azure (59%), but there's no doubt that Office 365 remains the big income stream for Microsoft cloud products.

■ Finally, during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, Microsoft saw daily active users of Microsoft Teams reach 75 million. Teams is Microsoft's fastest growing product in history.

To put it succinctly, Microsoft is crushing it with Office 365, and in turn, most enterprise knowledge workers are sitting in front of Office Apps and services all day long. Therefore, the importance of Digital Experience Monitoring solutions for monitoring Office 365 keeps growing too.

What's It Mean to Monitor the Digital Experience of Office 365 Apps?

It's simple — employees and knowledge workers are using Office 365 apps and services, so you want to monitor performance and detect issues and outages before your users do. Your business and different departments within IT demand to be informed proactively instead of re-actively when it comes to Office 365 and network problems.

Often, the only way to go about monitoring Office 365 is via synthetic transaction monitoring (STM). Though there are some Real User Monitoring (RUM) solutions for Office 365 that can passively monitor SaaS apps. For the following set of requirements in this article, we'll focus mostly on synthetic monitoring because its where every organization should start so they can know about issues proactively.

Digital Experience for Exchange Online

Exchange Online is said to be the biggest workload for Office 365 when it comes to consumption and resources. And, while everyone loves to sound the death knell of Email, we all continue to collaborate (at least in business) via Email. As such, organizations of all sizes need to monitor the uptime, availability and performance of Email.

When it comes to Office 365, Email monitoring means:

■ Exchange Online, the core of the service

■ Outbound SMTP filters if you use them (you probably do)

■ Inbound SPAM/Junk/Anti-Virus providers

■ Phishing Providers and other hygiene services for Email if they are separate from your SPAM/Junk blockers

For proactive monitoring of Exchange Online in Office 365, the following are required elements that should be checked:

■ Mailbox performance, uptime and availability
- Sign-on, Login, Folders, Inbox access
- Client Access Server (CAS or CASArray) (when it comes to the Office 365 Suite)
- Mailbox Server

■ End-to-end network view, Round Trip Times (RTT), and latency from the end-user's perspective. Accessing real-world protocols from the same sites and locations that users are is critical to DEM solutions. Monitoring uptime and availability from a cloud network is pointless and irrelevant.

■ Microsoft Exchange Online Protect (EOP) performance, inbound and outbound mail queues. How long does it take to get an email out, in, and through the internet to a destination?

■ Internet mail flow, transport timings and the SPAM performance. You want to make sure that your inbound and outbound mail delivery is efficient and timely.

■ Email delivery reliability and overall availability

■ Archive Mail access and performance

■ Mail search performance

■ Different access methods and protocols for Exchange Online and there's lots of them including; EWS, ActiveSync, OWA, MAPI, Graph and more.

■ Calendar access, availability and performance

■ FreeBusy shared and hybrid lookup performance

■ Appointment creation, updating and lookup performance

These are the critical elements to monitor for a proper Exchange Online Service Level Agreement.

Go to Office 365 Digital Experience Monitoring Crucial to Enterprise Productivity - Part 2

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Office 365 Digital Experience Monitoring Crucial to Enterprise Productivity - Part 1

Jason Lieblich

Office 365 Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is critical to most every enterprise these days. Why? It's clear Microsoft 365 is winning when it comes to collaboration and productivity with more innovation, polish and features than other platforms. Most enterprises are dependent on Office 365.


Office 365 Growth and Adoption

Office 365 and its corresponding cloud services, Azure, Office Apps and everything in between has grown to be the leader. Some of the latest figures for Office 365 and Azure growth:

■ 200 Million Active Daily Users — A staggering number! On Microsoft's FY20 Q1 earnings call on October 23 (link to call transcript), they updated the number from the previous 180 million in April 2019 to 200 million. These are numbers that make every SaaS vendor jealous!

■ Office 365 revenue growth at 36% YoY, weaker than Azure (59%), but there's no doubt that Office 365 remains the big income stream for Microsoft cloud products.

■ Finally, during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, Microsoft saw daily active users of Microsoft Teams reach 75 million. Teams is Microsoft's fastest growing product in history.

To put it succinctly, Microsoft is crushing it with Office 365, and in turn, most enterprise knowledge workers are sitting in front of Office Apps and services all day long. Therefore, the importance of Digital Experience Monitoring solutions for monitoring Office 365 keeps growing too.

What's It Mean to Monitor the Digital Experience of Office 365 Apps?

It's simple — employees and knowledge workers are using Office 365 apps and services, so you want to monitor performance and detect issues and outages before your users do. Your business and different departments within IT demand to be informed proactively instead of re-actively when it comes to Office 365 and network problems.

Often, the only way to go about monitoring Office 365 is via synthetic transaction monitoring (STM). Though there are some Real User Monitoring (RUM) solutions for Office 365 that can passively monitor SaaS apps. For the following set of requirements in this article, we'll focus mostly on synthetic monitoring because its where every organization should start so they can know about issues proactively.

Digital Experience for Exchange Online

Exchange Online is said to be the biggest workload for Office 365 when it comes to consumption and resources. And, while everyone loves to sound the death knell of Email, we all continue to collaborate (at least in business) via Email. As such, organizations of all sizes need to monitor the uptime, availability and performance of Email.

When it comes to Office 365, Email monitoring means:

■ Exchange Online, the core of the service

■ Outbound SMTP filters if you use them (you probably do)

■ Inbound SPAM/Junk/Anti-Virus providers

■ Phishing Providers and other hygiene services for Email if they are separate from your SPAM/Junk blockers

For proactive monitoring of Exchange Online in Office 365, the following are required elements that should be checked:

■ Mailbox performance, uptime and availability
- Sign-on, Login, Folders, Inbox access
- Client Access Server (CAS or CASArray) (when it comes to the Office 365 Suite)
- Mailbox Server

■ End-to-end network view, Round Trip Times (RTT), and latency from the end-user's perspective. Accessing real-world protocols from the same sites and locations that users are is critical to DEM solutions. Monitoring uptime and availability from a cloud network is pointless and irrelevant.

■ Microsoft Exchange Online Protect (EOP) performance, inbound and outbound mail queues. How long does it take to get an email out, in, and through the internet to a destination?

■ Internet mail flow, transport timings and the SPAM performance. You want to make sure that your inbound and outbound mail delivery is efficient and timely.

■ Email delivery reliability and overall availability

■ Archive Mail access and performance

■ Mail search performance

■ Different access methods and protocols for Exchange Online and there's lots of them including; EWS, ActiveSync, OWA, MAPI, Graph and more.

■ Calendar access, availability and performance

■ FreeBusy shared and hybrid lookup performance

■ Appointment creation, updating and lookup performance

These are the critical elements to monitor for a proper Exchange Online Service Level Agreement.

Go to Office 365 Digital Experience Monitoring Crucial to Enterprise Productivity - Part 2

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Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

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Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

Why AI in IT Is Producing High Productivity but Heavy Workloads

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

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Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

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