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When operating within the Microsoft 365 environment, you’ll appreciate its innovative features and services that set it apart from other platforms. However, for seamless use of its integrated applications, monitoring the health status of Microsoft 365 services is vital. The Microsoft 365 admin center includes the Service Health page, offering a comprehensive view of service health for associated applications. While real-time alerts may be lacking, this blog guides IT admins on using this page to stay informed about any incidents that may arise, ensuring efficient troubleshooting.
How to check service health in Microsoft 365?
Having discussed what to do when encountering an issue in any Microsoft 365 application, the critical question is how and what to specifically look for. This section provides answers to these queries by outlining the necessary steps to follow:
- First, browse https://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 experiencing issue doesn’t reflect on the Service health page, you can inform the Microsoft team by clicking on Report an issue.
The “Reported Issue” feature enables you to monitor the status of all reported issues from your organization. This platform also offers customization options for your dashboard view, allowing you to select the services you wish to display. To do this, simply click on “Preferences -> Custom View” and deselect the checkboxes for services you don’t want to appear on the Service Health Dashboard. Furthermore, you can set up email notifications to stay informed about any new incidents that alter the service status.
To activate this feature, navigate to Preferences -> Email -> Send me service health notifications via email. You can designate up to two email addresses to receive alerts and select specific services for notification. Additionally, rather than subscribing to email notifications for all events, you can opt for individual event subscriptions. To do this, choose the active issue for which you desire email notifications, then click on “Manage notification for this issue.” Lastly, specify the email address where you wish to receive these alerts.
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 as follows:
- Title: Defines abstract of the issue.
- ID: A unique number that is assigned to each issue.
- Service: Name of the affected service.
- Last Updated: This gives the last time when service health status was updated.
- Estimated Start Time: This gives the estimated time when the issue started.
- Status: Shows the impact of the issue on the service.
- User Impact: How the impact of an issue affects the end user.
- All Updates: Includes updates to let you know the progress of resolving the specific issue.
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 the outside of 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.
Conclusion
As a Microsoft 365 user, it’s crucial to stay informed about the health status of all Microsoft 365 services. Failure to address issues promptly can disrupt your work. For instance, if your Microsoft 365 mailbox data faces vulnerabilities, it’s essential to maintain a backup of your Office 365 mailbox data or recover deleted emails from Office 365. One efficient solution is Kernel Office 365 Backup & Restore. This popular tool backs up mailboxes, shared mailboxes, archive mailboxes, public folders, and Microsoft 365 groups in various formats, including PST, PDF, DOCX, DOX, and EML. It also offers smart filters for selecting specific data and streamlines the backup process with an inbuilt CSV file.