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Many of today’s enterprises are heavily reliant on the Office365 suite for internal communication and cross-functional workflows. In fact, Microsoft’s cloud office suite is used by over 1 million companies worldwide, and adoption continues to grow each year.
Along with streamlined communication, enterprises hope to improve their productivity with Office365’s comprehensive set of tools. That’s because the cloud suite’s apps—Outlook, Sharepoint, OneDrive, Teams, Yammer, and Skype—are accessible from nearly any device and location across the globe. But that doesn’t mean using Microsoft’s cloud office suite isn't without its challenges for IT teams.
While Office365 can reduce costs and enable a more productive workforce, organizations still need to ensure that the suite remains online and functioning at all times. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at why Office365 monitoring is critical, and how RapDev’s new Datadog integration can make monitoring easier.
A key advantage of Office365 is that it’s cloud-based and accessible, but what happens if there’s unexpected downtime? The fact is: Office365 has had downtime in the past, including worldwide outages with specific Microsoft applications and isolated incidents in Europe as well.
Moreover, just a few minutes of network or device issues with Office365 can dramatically impact the business. Gartner has even estimated that network downtime can cost organizations on average $300k per hour. That’s why it’s crucial to detect issues early, so operations staff can proactively identify and mitigate the impact outages can have on business continuity.
Not only can monitoring alert you when Office365 is down or degraded, but it can also help you detect non-critical issues that still impact the employee experience. Enhanced visibility into your internal tech stack ensures uninterrupted user experiences and differentiates your organization from the competition. End-to-end visibility from your network and office locations to Microsoft’s cloud, therefore, is essential for making the most of Office365.
With the need for telemetry and monitoring at the forefront for business leaders, RapDev has built an Office365 integration with the Datadog platform, which we’ve recently launched on the Datadog marketplace. Our integration aligns closely with Datadog’s mission to give enterprises detailed visibility into their infrastructure, apps, and more from a centralized interface.
More specifically, the Office365 integration enables enterprises to monitor all of their processes and service levels related to the Microsoft cloud within Datadog. Through continuous testing and monitoring, organizations can detect and isolate potential risks quickly and efficiently. Here are some key features of the integration.
With the new integration, enterprises can monitor the performance of all Office365 applications across every remote office, analyze key performance metrics, and set OOTB alerts whenever metrics cross certain thresholds. Relevant metrics can include the number of logins, DNS response times, and other application performance indicators. Tracking and managing enterprise-level performance can ensure seamless communication and workflows throughout the organization.
Synthetic monitoring—or simulating user activity using automated scripts—is a powerful way to anticipate end-user issues before they occur. Our integration enables synthetic monitoring of Office365 by deploying remote probes that emulate the usage of various apps from all office locations. These probes can run in the background at continuous intervals to test application transactions, Sharepoint site performance, and more. Besides confirming uptime of each Microsoft app, synthetic monitoring allows you to understand the user experience (UX) in real-time and resolve issues before employees experience them.
Synthetic testing can also be used for email performance monitoring across any number of mailboxes. Email is the preferred method of communication for most enterprises, so ensuring there are zero interruptions when sending or receiving emails is crucial. By sending test emails to various mailbox servers, organizations can collect data related to SMTP relay hops, service anomalies, and other performance metrics. Poor email service can lead to real business challenges like customer dissatisfaction or loss of sales, so it’s important to keep Microsoft Exchange and Outlook running smoothly. Monitoring emails from external sources will allow you to benchmark your mail performance through your internal spam and security filters.
Office365 requires licenses for each user, but enterprise workforces are ever changing. When employees leave the company or departments are restructured, unused licenses can go unnoticed. Using our integration, organizations can easily monitor licensing usage for all of their Office365 accounts. That means you can identify licenses that have been inactive for 30, 60, or 180 and identify opportunities to reduce spending on Microsoft’s licensed products.
Don’t wait until IT tickets are opened about your Office365 suite to resolve them. By that point, there could already be a negative impact on end-user communication and productivity. Instead, proactively monitor your cloud suite performance using Datadog, and have peace of mind that your organization will continue operating efficiently.
If you need monitoring for your Office365 suite, you can find our Office365 integration in the Datadog marketplace here. You can even take monitoring a step further and implement our other Datadog integrations as well.
