Read time: 9 minutes
Summary: Microsoft 365 Service Health Monitoring provides a real-time dashboard that helps you monitor the status of SharePoint, Exchange Online, and other Office 365 services. With this dashboard, Office 35 admins can detect issues within the organization and trace any planned maintenance. It is important to understand the service health in detail to evaluate the performance of Office 365 apps and services in your organization.
Issues in the Microsoft 365 services mean a complete downgrade in the performance of the organization. No Office admin wants to be the last person knowing about the issues. This is where Microsoft 365 service health monitoring enters. With an interactive dashboard that provides details on the incidents, you can proactively tackle the issues before the impacts are spread all over the organization.
The Service Health page within the dashboard provides the health status and a comprehensive view of the service health for all the associated applications. If any issue occurs, it will reflect on the specific page. To aggressively monitor the service health, you must first understand it thoroughly.
Major Aspects of Office 365 Service Health Monitoring
Check what you can track using the health monitoring dashboard:
Incident details: Provides incident details, such as scope, investigation status, & estimated time to resolve.
History View: Check out the service incidents/ advisories of the last 30 days to detect repetitive incidents.
Notifications: Admins can subscribe to receive alerts in their emails or the mobile application of Microsoft 365.
Real-time status: Shows status of the services health, marking as Green checkmark (healthy), Orange triangle (service degradation), or Red circle (outage).
Message center: Delivers info. related to upcoming feature updates, maintenance, or changes required.
Importance of Monitoring Service Health in Microsoft 365
What is the importamce of Microsoft 365 Monitoring Service Health? Here is what you need to know.
Business progress: Microsoft 365, despite being a cloud-based platform, can often undergo issues and outages. With the alerts for real-time status, IT teams can effectively manage the workflows.
Planning maintenance: The dashboard shares details on the maintenance job scheduled, such that the organization can be proactively ready to tackle any upcoming service issues.
Analyze historical data: Provides insights from 30 days of historical usage to help administrators establish that their business ecosystem within Office 365 is highly operational and secure.
Better communication: Office 365 Service Health Monitoring presents precise and thorough information about the users affected and expected time to resolve the issue. This allows for reducing the number of tickets raised for helpdesk support.
Minimize troubleshooting time: With the help of Office 365 health check dashboard, Office administrators can easily check and identify the reason behind the issue, such as a service outage. It helps in reducing the time required to troubleshoot a problem from the system.
Roles Required for Office 365 Service Health Monitoring
Make sure you have the following roles assigned to the intended users to maintain the effective workflow with minimum incidents or advisories.
- Global Admin: manages everything in Microsoft Entra ID along with the Microsoft Services using these identities.
- Service Support Admin: has access to read the entire service health info and creates helpdesk tickets without requiring elevated permissions from the Global admin.
- Help Desk Admin: views service health information and resets passwords for helpdesk administrators and other general users.
- Global Reader: can only view the entire information that the Global admin has access to without the permissions to edit or update anything.
- Message Center Privacy Reader: Checks out the security and privacy incident messages and related updates.
How to Check Service Health in Microsoft 365?
Now we know what to do when a problem occurs in any Microsoft 365 application, but the major question is how and what to look for. This section will help you to get the answers to these questions. You must follow the below steps to check Microsoft 365 service health:
- First, browse admin.microsoft.com to access the Microsoft 365 admin center using your global administrator credentials.
- From the listed menu, go to Health -> Service Health. You can also do this by selecting the Service Health card from the Home dashboard. After performing this step, you will get detailed information about the health status of the Microsoft 365 applications.
- On the Service Health page, you will see different tabs listed on the top. If you click on All services, it shows all services along with their health status, active incidents, and Advisories.
- If there is any active incident in the applications, it will be shown on the Incidents tab. You can also see it under the service name on the All services page.
- You can view the advisory for services from the Advisories tab. It will also be displayed on the All Services page.
- If you click on the History tab, the last 30 days’ incidents and advisories that have been resolved will be listed on the page. If your issue doesn’t reflect on the Service health page, you can inform the Microsoft team by clicking on Report an issue.
The Reported Issue helps you to track the Office 365 health status of all issues that a person has reported from your organization. This platform also allows you to customize the view of your dashboard. It means that you can select the service you want to show in the dashboard. For this, you simply need to click on Preferences -> Custom View and then uncheck the checkboxes of the services you don’t want to view in the Service Health Dashboard. In addition, you can also get email notifications to be aware of any new incident that results in a change in the service status.
To enable this feature, click on Preferences -> Email -> Send me service health notifications in email. To receive email alerts, you can specify up to two email addresses; it also allows you to choose desired services from the available ones for notifications. Furthermore, instead of subscribing to email notifications of all events, you can also subscribe to an individual event. For this, select the active issue for which you want email notification and then click on Manage notification for this issue. Finally, specify the email address where you will receive the email alerts.
How to View Details of Service Health Issue?
When you click on any issue title listed on the All services view, it shows detailed information about the specific issue, which includes several listings. The incident summary related to any Microsoft 365 service health issue provides the following information:
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | Issue/problem summary |
| ID | Numerical identifier assigned to the problem |
| Last updated | Last time service health status was updated |
| Estimated start time | Expected start time of the issue |
| Affected services | List of services impacted |
| Issue type | Severity of the advisory or incident |
| Issue origin | Indicates whether the issue is from Microsoft or on-premises |
| Status | Current state of the incident |
| User impact | How the issue affects users |
| All updates | Messages showing progress of the issue |
Status Defining Terms and their Definitions
To get a clear idea about the status of the service health, here we have listed them with the definitions:
- Investigating: It means that the Microsoft support team is aware of the specific issue, and now they are gathering more information to resolve it.
- Service degradation: It shows when a service is running more slowly than usual, or some of its features are not working.
- Service interruption: It shows when an issue affects the ability of the user to access a specific service.
- Restoring service: This status shows that the actual cause of an issue has been identified, and now they are taking action to bring the service back to its original state.
- Extended recovery: It indicates that the corrective actions are in progress, but it will take some time to recover. You can also see this status when a temporary fix has been applied to reduce the impact and wait for the permanent fix.
- Investigation suspended: This status shows that the detailed investigation needs some additional information from the user end to investigate further.
- Service restored: You will see this status when your underlying problem has been resolved successfully. You can view the reason behind the specific issue in the Issue details.
- False positive: This status shows that the service is already healthy and doesn’t require repairing anything. The cause of the incident is mainly from outside the service.
- Post-incident report published: You will see this status when they publish a Post Incident Report that includes the root cause of the issue. The reason behind publishing this report is to ensure that a similar problem will not recur in the future.
Note: You can also utilize the Microsoft 365 Admin app on your mobile to view the Service health status, which is a quick and easier way to be aware with phone notifications.
Tips to Fix Service Health Issues in Microsoft 365
Here are some tips that will help you minimize or avoid service health issues:
- Always execute proactive monitoring of the service health using the dashboard, setup alerts, report issues timely, and check the message center.
- Regularly check and fix the application for specific issues, such as oversized mailboxes in Outlook/ Exchange, review user access rights in SharePoint & OneDrive, etc.
- Check for the licenses in the Office 365 admin center that might be expiring or assigned incorrectly.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication for all Office 365 users to avoid compromising accounts that can impact the overall service
- Set the Microsoft 365 apps to receive monthly updates for best and stable performance.
- Do not forget to keep a backup copy of Office 365 data to avoid data loss under all scenarios.
- Regularly check and update the Office 365 retention policy to define how long the data is retained if any issue occurs.
Stay Ahead of the Outage with Microsoft 365 Service Health Check
Office 365 Service Health Monitoring is something that no longer needs to be a responsive approach; it should be a proactive attempt. This is what can help you take necessary actions against the incidents at the correct time and resolve them properly. During situations where your Microsoft 365 mailbox data becomes vulnerable to breaches or corruption, it becomes necessary to back up your Office 365 mailbox data.
Use a reliable Office 365 backup software like Kernel Office 365 Backup and Restore, to back up everything without missing even a single item. It will back up your mailboxes, shared mailboxes, archive mailboxes, public folders, and Microsoft 365 groups in multiple output formats.
Frequently Asked Questions
Setting up an Office 365 service health dashboard helps with real-time monitoring of the service status, proactive incident management, promoting user communication, and even more.
Service health in Azure helps in performing personalized monitoring of the Office 365 platforms and identifying issues that might be affecting your regions.
However, Azure resource health helps you perform resource specific monitoring for the service health in Office 365. It will drop you a notification if any resource goes down.
To avoid the risk of workflow disruptions during service outages, here is how you can use Office 365 service health check:
1. Go to the All Services section to get a detailed overview of the incidents and advisories.
2. Check out the All Updates tab to find the incident report. Connect with the Microsoft engineers to get a temporary solution to fix the issue before final fixes.
