Office 365
Just about 2 weeks after its most recent outage, Microsoft experienced a severe DNS outage Thursday Evening at approximately 21:30 UTC on 01 Apr 2021. That's the official start of the outage from Microsoft. But we all know that official starts and actual starts are often different ...
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to changing the experience of employees during a pandemic, but technological innovation can have a positive impact on how employees work from home as companies design their digital workspace strategy. The IT team supporting this shift needs to think about the following questions ...
Few tools provide early detection of mission-critical mail outages. On March 15, Microsoft had a service outage worldwide that impacted its services such as Teams AV, Yammer, OneDrive, and Azure Active Directory. Users reported not being able to login into either of these services and were getting timeout messages ...
On Wednesday January 27, 2021, Microsoft Office 365 experienced an outage affected a number of its services with a prolonged outage affecting Exchange Online. Despite Microsoft indicating that it was just Exchange Online affected during this outage, some monitoring tools detected that Azure Active Directory and dependent services like SharePoint and OneDrive were also affected at the time. The outage information indicated a rollout and rollback but we wouldn't expect to see such a widescale outage and slowdown just affecting some of the schema unless everything had to be taken offline ...
With so many of us working from home, IT leaders and executives are now more than ever interested in ensuring that the cloud services their team relies on are available. But instead of accessing popular business-critical applications such as Salesforce, G Suite, Office 365, Microsoft 365, and so on through the company's data center, employees now get these services directly from the Internet. Experience and productivity at each location vary by internet, ISP, gateway, proxy, etc. ...
Soon after the outbreak of the pandemic, managing a remote workforce has become complex; new distributed traffic patterns and application access paths have emerged. Employees now connect directly to the internet to access their favorite SaaS apps (Office365, Microsoft 365, Zoom, Salesforce, etc.) Businesses do not control the applications that users connect to or cannot control where they connect from ...
As work shifts to a new environment setting, executives report that at least half of their distributed workforce consistently experiences poor experiences with SaaS apps they use. The phenomenal growth of Microsoft Teams has resulted in video call rates increasing by over 1000% in recent months. However, outages have found a way to plague Teams causing disruptions during meetings and broadcasts. In this unprecedented era, the continued success of Teams operations relies on monitoring and managing quality metrics in real-time ...
You surf the internet, don't you? While all of us are at home due to Covid lock-down and accepting a new reality, the majority of the work is happening online. IT managers are looking for tools that can track the user digital experience. Executives are reading a report from Gartner or Forrester about some of the best networking monitoring solutions available on the market. Project managers are using Microsoft Teams online to communicate and ensure team members are meeting deliverables on time. Remote employees everywhere use OWA to check their office mails. No matter what, you can be quite sure that everyone is using their favorite browser and search engine for connecting online and accomplish tasks ...
Companies love data. Aggregating data from multiple sources makes decision-making easier and brings a new depth of the conversation to business meetings. But all of this is at the management level. IT managers and administrators also search for data from multiple sources to ensure that the ecosystem works ...
Having Twitter feeds from your dependent tech stack properties alongside end-to-end network monitoring can benefit IT to speed troubleshooting, reduce MTTR, and ultimately provide a better end-user experience ...
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) has become significant to businesses more than ever. Global events like Covid continue to disrupt best practices within IT to support business. The pandemic has already forced millions of employees to WFH and adopt a hybrid workspace. Network connectivity and cloud application issues in these environments will continue to impact productivity and slow progress. Even so, transparent migration and deployment of on-premise workloads across multi-cloud providers, by their very nature are complex ...
Maintaining call quality with Microsoft Teams is a process, not a onetime event. Network engineers and Microsoft Teams application owners need to be vigilant in preserving optimal call quality to ensure audio, video, and screen-sharing always remain satisfactory for end-users. In this blog, we cover how the Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) combined with the audio/video synthetic transaction monitoring improves this maintenance process ...
Return to work is happening. After working remotely from home for months due to Covid, companies are now offering employees the option to return to their workplace. But how will IT prioritize its activities towards this new paradigm shift? ...
Starting this September, the lifespan of an SSL/TLS certificate has been limited to 398 days, a reduction from the previous maximum certificate lifetime of 825 days. With this change, everyone needs to more carefully monitor SSL certificate expiration and server characteristics ...
Legacy tools traditionally utilized by IT organizations for alerting and on-premises performance monitoring are inadequate in this age of WFH and multi-cloud integration. A true Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) strategy ensures that optimizing the end-user experience for these tools is critical for better performance and higher productivity ...
Despite the efforts in modernizing and building a robust infrastructure, IT teams routinely deal with the application, database, hardware, or software outages that can last from a few minutes to several days. These types of incidents can cause financial losses to businesses and damage its reputation ...
A company looking to improve the end-user experience and shorten the response time can effectively crowdsource application and network performance data from its global customer base. This collected data is vital in evaluating a healthy state of network, applications, gateways, ISPs, internet routing, and DNS/server response time ...
Digital Experience Monitoring is a tool that should be integrated with an organization's change management strategy. A key benefit of SaaS/cloud is no longer being responsible for software and hardware upgrades, maintenance, and patch cycles. Migrating to Microsoft Office 365 means no longer spending precious time and resources on Windows, Exchange or SharePoint upgrades for example. But that doesn't mean that IT can ignore changes or doesn't need to monitor for their effects ...
As systems become more complex and IT loses direct control of infrastructure (hello cloud), it becomes both more difficult and more important to capture and observe, holistically, the user experience. SaaS or cloud apps like Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, and Workday have become mission-critical to most businesses and therefore need to be examined when it comes to experience monitoring ...
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 ...
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. Therefore, the importance of Digital Experience Monitoring solutions for monitoring Office 365 keeps growing too ...
It is inevitable that employee productivity and the quality of customer experiences suffer as a consequence of the poor performance of O365. The quick detection and rapid resolution of problems associated with O365 are top of mind for any organization to keep its business humming ...
By maximizing the knowledge of end-to-end quality of service (QoS) using virtualized network functions (VNFs), the SD-WAN (edge) gateway establishes a suitable connection with minimal latency and maximum performance so that entire organizations can make the most of the Office 365 application suite ...
Market exuberance for Office 365 has inspired business mandates to adopt the cloud-hosted collaboration and productivity suite without regards to the underlying chaos. While multi-location organizations are virtualizing, operating models haven’t necessarily changed. This partial transformation that excludes automation and simplification of the network puts Office 365 deployments (and other software-as-a-service offerings) in danger of failing ...
The move to cloud-based solutions like Office 365, Google Apps and others is one of the biggest fundamental changes IT professionals will undertake in the history of computing. The cost savings and productivity enhancements available to organizations are huge. But these savings and benefits can't be reaped without careful planning, network assessment, change management and continuous monitoring. Read on for things that you shouldn't do with your network in preparation for a move to one of these cloud providers ...
