Only Exoprise provides full coverage for synthetic monitoring of the entire Microsoft 365 suite. The use of 8-10 different synthetic sensors per site provides customers and prospects with an ideal start. These site locations may include corporate headquarters, branch offices, or work from home settings with knowledge workers. Exoprise effectively monitors the health, availability, and performance of applications such as Azure AD, Exchange Online, Teams, Yammer, OneDrive, Outlook, Portal, etc. via synthetic sensors and captures real-time metric data in CloudReady. Most sensors are a single sensor credit but some are more so IT administrators should obtain anywhere between 12-18 sensor credits per location depending on how deeply they want to monitor. Typically, a single virtual machine or laptop with 4GB of RAM and Windows easily supports such a configuration.

Complete coverage of Microsoft 365 by Exoprise synthetic sensors

Azure AD (AAD)

Azure Active Directory is a multi-tenant cloud directory and identity management service. In your business, employees who work from home remotely or the office rely on Azure AD to login to multiple Office 365 services and access them through a single set of cloud credentials. Monitoring Azure AD within Exoprise is an OAuth-based Graph API test. Errors or performance problems with Azure AD sensor are usually an early indication of problems with other Microsoft services and have a cascading effect.

Azure AD serves as the backbone of the Office 365 system. Even if you do not use Azure AD for a single sign-on, it is the catalog for Office 365 identities, profile access, and permissions. In other words, there is a massive dependence on Azure AD, and its uptime, availability, and performance from multiple locations is hyper-critical to anyone using Office 365 or Azure. This makes Azure AD an important sensor to be deployed within CloudReady.

Exoprise AAD sensor to test OAuth API test and record performance metrics

Email Graph

The Email Graph sensor tests and monitors Exchange Online using the new Graph API. As businesses continue to operate remotely, it is more important than ever to have a robust email communication infrastructure for collaboration. When email access is down or slow, it impacts end-user productivity, and businesses suffer. The Email Graph API sensor synthetically tests Microsoft Graph authentication, permission access, uptime, and mailbox availability no matter what location. Monitor Office 365 Mail queues, SPAM filters and troubleshoot slow email delivery for exchange online. Exoprise emulates a real user utilizing Exchange online end-to-end and monitoring the entire experience. The email graph sensor sends synthetic emails between the mail platform and CloudReady autoresponders to test the email delivery, reliability, and performance of the underlying infrastructure. Once an email is generated, the sensor confirms that the message has been sent by checking the corresponding folders and headers on the outbound side and waits for a response.

Exoprise sensor to monitor hop-by-hop data and record mail queue metrics

Outlook Web Access

Exoprise Outlook Web Access (OWA) sensor tests and monitors Office 365’s Outlook web app with a headless browser. The OWA sensor synthetically tests and emulates a real user signing into the email system and collects backend login time metrics for end-to-end performance and availability monitoring. OWA is easy to use and set up for occasional users who may need quick access to Exchange email or calendar. Exoprise CloudReady supports monitoring OWA from private sites behind the firewall and public clouds. The sensor works across various server and single sign-on solutions to fully test OWA and Exchange online application delivery. This allows ensuring that your Exchange and Office 365 tenant is working 100% correctly. By sending test messages to Exoprise auto-responder, customers can ensure that OWA mail delivery works properly and there are no slow email queues regardless of SPAM protection.

Exoprise Outlook Web Access sensor for monitoring OAuth API and headless browser test

Microsoft Portal Sensor

The Microsoft portal sensor tests and monitors the Office 365 web portal for proactive performance and availability by automatically signing in as a real user from Exoprise private or public cloud sites and navigating through the portal. The sensor captures rich and contextual network performance data between the site and application. Within the Login & Render tab, customers can easily access and analyze the Office 365 full portal login time trends over some time. The authentication time dictates how long it takes for a user to do a single sign-on in the portal. Identify and compare O365 portal metrics such as DOM Loaded Time, Initial Layout Time, Time to First Byte, CPU%, etc., and so on with Exoprise unique crowd-sourced data. The network path performance or NPP tab displays the user’s quick information about the current trace. A waterfall representation of the trace provides a round trip time of each hop relative to other hops in the trace. Check for default alarms setup for the sensor and the corresponding error notification in real-time.

Exoprise Microsoft 365 Portal Monitoring to test upload and download time

SharePoint Online

Microsoft 365 SharePoint is a web-based solution for businesses to collaborate and share knowledge. SharePoint end-to-end monitoring is a headless browser complete coverage test that emulates a real user logging in, uploading, and downloading files providing bandwidth estimates. Exoprise proactively captures Logon times and detailed page metrics for faster troubleshooting. Installing a SharePoint sensor on a private site is easy. After successful installation, the Logon Tab provides end-users with detailed and crowd-based benchmark information on the SharePoint logon duration. While the Logon Time is captured as part of the overall login process, Managed and Federated Login time deal with Office 365 and on-premise identity service respectively. Access and control to SharePoint can be protected by a cloud-based or on-premise Single Sign-On (SSO) solution. Exoprise recommends setting up sensors for each.

Exoprise monitoring of SharePoint for Login health and status

OneDrive

Exoprise supports Microsoft 365 OneDrive monitoring similar to SharePoint with OAuth credentials as well as full experience monitoring via a headless browser. The sensor emulates a real user signing into OneDrive to collect end-to-end performance metrics such as health score, server latency, login times, etc. across the infrastructure and measure optimal availability. After successful deployment of the OneDrive sensor, the Logon tab provides real-time statistics on page login information and the time it takes to log onto OneDrive server. The Managed and Federated Time provide Single Sign-On visibility into Office 365 cloud and on-premise identity service respectively. Check alarms and errors generated over a certain period of time. The Data Point Details tab provides an instant comparison between individual metrics and the crowd to find anomalies. Detect the slowest hop and trace data in the network performance tab.

Microsoft 365 OneDrive monitoring by Exoprise sensor

Microsoft Teams Audio Video

Microsoft Teams is an enterprise collaboration platform that combines video, chat, voice, and file sharing for today’s workforce. Exoprise CloudReady Teams Audio Video (Teams AV) conferencing sensor utilizes WebRTC technology and an automated A/V Bot to monitor the health and performance of Microsoft Teams. Using Teams AV sensors in your environment is critical to proactively test, benchmark, and monitor network capacity, packet loss, VoIP performance, and most importantly outages. If your business uses tools like Zoom or Ring Central, deploy VoIP sensors to Azure and/or AWS to simulate and detect network packet loss, congestion, and more. While most sensors cost 1 credit, advanced multi-party AV conference sensors like Teams are 5 credits due to the ongoing maintenance and coordination effort of the Exoprise A/V bot. 

After the deployment of the Teams AV sensor, the sensor interacts with Microsoft 365 Teams by creating a conference meeting in the team’s channel and inviting the Exoprise AV bot to participate. The bot starts collecting high and low threshold WebRTC statistics and streams audio and video content into the conference that the sensor is monitoring. Collected metrics can be analyzed by IT administrators to quickly diagnose Microsoft Teams audio-video performance issues such as packet and frame loss, high latency, and round-trip time, etc. Microsoft Teams outage on April 27 this year due to a configuration change was detected early by Exoprise sensors almost an hour before Microsoft acknowledged and released its report.

Exoprise Microsoft 365 Teams monitoring for early outage detection

Integrated Office 365 Service Health and Twitter feeds

Extend your Microsoft 365 stack monitoring with real-time status updates from the Office 365 communications API and Microsoft Twitter feed handle integrated into a single pane of glass. Configuring API settings and adding the widgets to CloudReady is easy and takes few minutes. Gain firsthand knowledge from Microsoft on service restoration, status updates, and application upgrade messages during downtime.

Exoprise dashboard for real-time status updates and notifications for Microsoft 365 services

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