Office 365 Outages: Practical Tips and Resources to Prepare for Next Time

Microsoft’s Office 365 has had a rough couple of months when it comes to service outages. While every outage is different, one thing remains constant – disruption to your organization.

Just think about the three most recent outages. Were you prepared? How were your first alerted? How did you respond? Were you able to calculate IT downtime and lost productivity among your end-users?

• April 1: DNS Outage Impacting Microsoft 365 & Azure (~5 hours)
• March 18: EMEA Microsoft 365 service outage (~6 hours)
• March 15: Global Azure AD (~9 hours)

Native Microsoft Outage Resources

At a minimum, we recommend following Microsoft outage resources below. However, only relying on a simple native alert still will not be able to provide you with a root cause analysis and impacts to your specific environment. It is a start in the right direction for minimizing disruption caused by Office 365 outages.

• Microsoft Azure Service Health*
  
• @azuresupport
  
• Microsoft 365 Service Health
  
• @Microsoft365status

ENow’s Office 365 Outage Center – Root Cause Analysis

Through Enow’s Office 365 Outage Center, we provide in-depth reports of recent Office 365 outages including the regions and Office 365 applications (Teams, Exchange Online, OneDrive, etc) impacted. Outage news is typically reported on the same day it occurs.

[EBook] Addressing the Office 365 Monitoring Gaps

Michael Van Horenbeeck | Jaap Wesselius | Justin Harris

Productivity comes to a screeching halt during Office 365 outages, as it did during the March 15 global Azure AD outage. While many believe the myth that ALL monitoring responsibilities now fall on Microsoft, IT is often still on the hook. Throughout this eBook the experts will discuss: discuss:

• Overview of Microsoft's Native Monitoring Tools
• Outage Scenarios (spoiler... its not all on Microsoft)
• Practical steps to fill the visibility gaps

[Webinar Series] Office 365 Outage Impacts
Part 1: Office 365 End User Experience & Why it Matters

In this on-demand webinar, Justin Harris (MCSM) discusses a modern user-centric approach to monitoring cloud-based solutions in this on demand webinar

• How do you monitor the experience of remote users?
• How do you know when there is a remote outage
• What is the quickest way to respond to outages?

[Webinar Series] Office 365 Outage Impacts
Part 2: How to Triage & Prepare for Business Continuity

In this on-demand webinar, Michael Van Horenbeeck (MVP) and Jay Gundotra (ENow CEO & Technical Founder) discuss actionable insights to ensure your organization is prepared for the next outage.

• Identify the scope of impact
• Effectively communicate with end users and management
• Restoring workplace productivity

Summary

Outages are a reminder that organizations are at the mercy of cloud providers, like Microsoft, however IT’s reputation is still on the hook. ENow can help IT Pros easily identify the services affected by an outage and drill down to the root cause. A rapid response plan enables IT to confidently inform upper management of issues and recommend alternative solutions until service is restored.

Do not wait for the next outage. Contact us today to learn more about our Office 365 monitoring solutions to ensure you are prepared for the next one.

The Importance of Office 365 Monitoring

In a cloud-world, outages are bound to happen. While Microsoft is responsible for restoring service during outages, IT needs to take ownership of their environment and user experience. It is crucial to have greater visibility into business impacts during a service outage the moment it happens.

ENow’s Office 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution enables IT Pros to pinpoint the exact services effected and root cause of the issues an organization is experiencing during a service outage by providing:

• The ability to monitor entire environments in one place with ENow’s OneLook dashboard which makes identifying a problem fast and easy without having to scramble through Twitter and the Service Health Dashboard looking for answers.
• A full picture of all services and subset of services affected during an outage with Enow’s remote probes which covers several Office 365 apps and other cloud-based collaboration services.

Identify the scope of Office 365 service outage impacts and restore workplace productivity with ENow’s Office 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution. Access your free 14-day trial today!