Office 365 Health Dashboard Now Available to All Site Administrators

Letting go of on-premise control is a very big part of moving your companies services to the cloud.

Companies and organizations who have moved to cloud services such as Office 365 still want to be capable of monitoring the system and services so they can be proactive in dealing with an issue and notifying their users that an outage or other limitation exists.

When it comes to critical services such as email and collaboration tools this is vitally important and Microsoft is now making tool available to all Office 365 subscriber administrators for this very purpose.

The Office 365 Service Health Dashboard is now generally available after being in preview mode since late September of 2016 - about five months if you are keeping track.

According to the Office 365 team - they understand how important a feature like the Service Health Dashboard is:

"We know that having visibility into the service is crucial for you, and we built the Service health dashboard with that in mind. We are now providing an even deeper level of service health insights that are personalized for your organization. This allows admins to stay on top of service incidents, improve their internal support experience and improve their users’ Office 365 experience."

Here is a rundown of the new features that are now generally available:

Access rich and more actionable incident insights—The dashboard now features a view that separates major business critical outages from others and splits them into two categories: Incidents and Advisories. This view makes it easy for you to identify issues that you might want to act on immediately.

Quickly understand the incident—A summary view surfaces the most relevant and critical details to you in two short sentences—easy and quick to consume. If you want to access additional details, you can go to a more detailed view that provides you with all available information, including workarounds and message history. You can also access a history of incidents and advisories that occurred in the past 30 days.

Easily see the impact for your organization—The dashboard allows you to quickly understand the impact of the service incident on your organization by showing you the number of impacted users. (Please note: This functionality is currently available for Exchange Online–related incidents only and will be extended to other workloads over time.)

Quickly provide feedback—A rating option now enables admins to provide feedback on the accuracy and usefulness of the information of each post on the Service health dashboard.

Other areas the team are looking to expand this tool with include:

Tell us about issues—If you are impacted by an issue that is not showing up on your Service health dashboard, the Tell us feature will provide you with a quick and easy way to let us know.

Stay informed through your preferred channel—The Service health dashboard will enable you to sign up for notifications via text and/or email, so that you can monitor the service and track issues through the channel you prefer.

Access user level details—In addition to the number of impacted users, you will also be able to access a full list of impacted users to enable you to drive more targeted communication and support.

Check the health of your users—On-demand user health checks will allow you to check end user health by running a test against our service. User Monitoring will enable you to proactively monitor specific users and to find out about possible health issues affecting those users right away—often before they might even notice them.

In-product messaging—The Service health dashboard will enable you to make your users aware of service incidents and inform them about possible workaround solutions through optional in-product notifications.

Other admin enhancements have been added to the Office 365 service in February and you can read about those here and here.

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