I have searched the blogs and saw older posts, but is there updated methods other than using the user experience monitors for monitoring Office 365?
Monitor what in Office 365? Office 365 encompases pretty much all of Microsoft's cloud hosting for Lync, Exchange, SharePoint, Office, and the likes. What is it you are expecting to monitor? What are you trying to monitor?
One thing to consider, based on the fact that Office 365 is so huge, and everybody will be using it slightly differently, finding generic monitors might be hard, especially with no details provided.
How about how to monitor Outlook 365?
Have you considered using the HTTPS Monitor, POP3 User Experience Monitor, and/or IMAP4 User Experience Monitor?
Personally, when we faced this at my previous role we just monitored our WAN connection and that to the outside world, if that was fine then O365 tended to be OK.
Microsoft provide a status page within the Admin console for you to monitor what is happening.
What use is monitoring an external service that you really don't have control over? Just wondering.
I can add to this question. We are rolling out O365 / Outlook in the next quarter. I would like to start with some baselines and establish what the user experience is on day 1 so that on day 55 and one of our offices calls in saying their email is slow I can compare the performance today vs. the performance on day 1. With over 55 different physical offices I would like to be able to compare the user experience in say NY 1 vs CA 22. Granted other factors will apply including but not limited to bandwidth capacity, traffic routing, and client PC to list a few but with NPM and Net flow I can keep an eye on bandwidth and traffic.
I think the user has a legit question / goal but maybe did not word it as clearly as possible.
This is a huge factor for many organizations since there is such push to cloud based computing. Many shops ran their own exchange servers which they could monitor from top to bottom. Now they are moving to the "cloud" and are still looking for a way to collect that data that was so important before. Just because we are paying someone else to host the services does not mean we are going to put of full faith in their service being bulletproof. If that was the case there would be no need for an SLA. I am sure each person who responded to this question has an SLA in the SOW that was signed. So maybe share how you are ensuring the SLA is being met each month? I have a feeling a lot of people are not thinking about this.
Its not much but we are just starting this effort. For today I plan to use WPM to log into OWA and give me some general user experience data from a few different remote offices. This is by no means ideal, but its a start. I am asking some of our more code friendly people to look at possibly having a VB or PS script launch the outlook client, send an email, launch a different client / mailbox and then compare the timing. Orion would be the method we used to launch the VB script if it works. This is just some ideas we are tossing around at the current time. Of course we will watch bandwidth with NPM and traffic with Netflow. I plan on checking for any Nagios scripts that may be used for Office 365 performance monitoring since Orion can run them as well.
Let me know if you find anything or have any solutions. I would be curious to hear any ideas you may have. I will post any new findings here as well.
