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Monitoring Office 365 with System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2

  • Article

Office 365 is becoming more and more commonly used these days. So naturally the requirement to monitor a bit more closely what exactly is going on in your subscription becomes a topic for a lot of small, medium and larger customers. Microsoft does offer a SCOM Management Pack for Office 365 (can be downloaded at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43708) but once you import it and look at the dashboard it provides, you might be a bit disappointed.

 

 

What the official Management Pack does give you is an overview of Incidents (Active and Resolved) and Planned Maintenance Times. There is no information on how well you are connected or what kind of performance your end users might experience. That got me thinking and experimenting around a little bit. I have created a management pack that gives you additional information on your Office 365 environment. So far only for Exchange Online, but the other components are in the works as well. The MP is not ready to share quite yet, I need to add some documentation and features to it, but I thought I test the waters a little bit by giving you all a little teaser screenshot of the current state of my O365 Exchange Online Dashboard…

Here is the Overview Dashboard

And then the detailed dashboard

So I would love to get some feedback from whoever reads this:

  • Is this useful?
  • What are the KPIs and/or synthetic transactions that are most interesting and important to you/your customers?

So much for the moment… Watch this space, there will be updates to this as I go along, hopefully with a lot of feedback from my readers.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2015
    Office 365 with Visual studio 2012.and windows server 2012R2.
  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2015
    Screenshot looks nice :)
  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2015
    This is what I wanted!
    Multi-tenant feature will be great, I think.(one SCOM environment can monitor several O365 tenants)
  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2015
    This is great for me!
  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2015
    It would be great to have mailbox Average Response and Processing time, similar to what we get in Outlook click via the 'Connection Status' option.
    Another goot feature to have would be network latency even if it is between SCOM and Exchange Online.
    for Hybrid implementations, it would be good to show Response time between Exchange On Prem and Exchange Online Protection (EOP)
    Looking forward to use this new MP :)
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2016
    Markus it's very useful MP! Looking forward to see it in xml format)
  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2016
    I would go also with multi tenant.
    Of course, knowing that the service is available from inside the client network to the Microsoft cloud (synthetic transaction) is great feature.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2016
    Markus, people want it!
  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2016
    Marcus,
    When do you think the MP will be available to us (the Microsoft SCOM users)?
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2016
    You should try Exoprise CloudReady, more information here: https://www.exoprise.com. You get end-to-end synthetics for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business PLUS integrated service comm status from Microsoft all in one place.

    Disclaimer: I am founder
  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2016
    OMS is launching also an office 365 dashboard.
  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2016
    Any updates or availability to try out this management pack. It looks useful and worth trying out.
  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2016
    This is what I wanted! Multi-tenant feature will be a good improvement! Thanks!
  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2016
    This looks promising. Any updates? Is Microsoft working on an updated MP for Office365 for SCOM on-premise?
  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2016
    Hi Markus, any New Development on this? I configured the original MP today and it is just as disappointing as it was last year. Using the available api gives more information...
  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2016
    This looks very useful; like others, I am wondering when it will be available. Monitoring this environment is key to a large majority of customers and this goes a long way to meeting the demand for a more holistic look at the performance.
  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2016
    Any news on this MP you were developing Marcus ?
  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2017
    wouldn't mind a copy
  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2017
    Any update on the MP?
  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2017
    Have there been any further developments with this management pack?
  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2017
    You are definitely going in the right direction with this, The key questions always asked to SCOM Admins is how is my Cloud Office 365 performing. we have only may occasions had the service down and not being able to identify root cause. is this Management Pack Available for End Users?Great Work MarkusGreat work