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Getting Started with Office 365 Exchange On-Demand Assessment

The On-Demand Assessment - Office 365 Exchange is a proactive service delivered by a Microsoft engineer to analyze and provide guidance on operations, configuration, and usage within an Office 365 subscription. This service is recommended to help get the most out of your Office 365 investment. This service provides specific focus on Messaging components of Office 365.

The Office 365 Exchange Assessment focuses on several key pillars, including:

  • Operational processes
  • Microsoft 365 Security
  • Exchange Mailbox Settings

Prerequisites

To take advantage of the On-Demand Assessments available through Services Hub, you must have:

  1. Have linked an active Azure Subscription to Services Hub and added the Office 365 Exchange Assessment. For more information please see: Assessment Setup Guide or watch the How to Link Services Hub to Azure Log Analytics.

  2. An Office 365 Global Administrator account is required for setting up the assessment.

    • MFA is supported.
    • Sovereign Cloud Supported

    Note

    Global Administrator is only required for setting up of the Exchange Online Assessment. The actual data collection only requires Global Reader access.

  3. Review the Prerequisites document for the Office 365 Exchange Assessment. This document explains the detailed technical documentation of the Office 365 Exchange Assessment and the preparation needed to run the assessment. It also documents the different types of data collected by the assessment.

  4. Set up the Microsoft Assessment Application

    Note

    On average, it takes 30 minutes to initially configure your environment to run an On-Demand Assessment. Once you run an assessment, you can review the data in Azure Log Analytics. The data provides you with a prioritized list of recommendations, categorized across six focus areas. This list allows you and your team to quickly understand risk levels, the health of your environments, act to decrease risk, and improve your overall IT health.*

    Set up the Office 365 Exchange Assessment on the data collection machine - Watch Video Guide

Install PowerShell Cmdlets

On your designated data collection machine, complete the following steps:

  1. Install the Exchange Online PowerShell Module.

  2. Create the working directory for the Assessment data. For example C:\EXOA (or any other folder you want besides C:\ODA, which is reserved by the system).

    WorkingDirectory is a path to an existing directory used to store the files created while collecting and analyzing the data from the environment

  3. Open the Windows PowerShell command prompt with [Run as Administrator].

  4. Run the following commands:

    Add-ExchangeOnlineAssessmentTask –WorkingDirectory <Directory>

    Note

    This configuration uses PowerShell variables to help facilitate the setup process.

    Add-ExchangeOnlineAssessmentTask –WorkingDirectory <Directory>

  5. You'll be prompted to enter an account that's able to run a scheduled task on the machine. Provide the required user account credentials to run the Scheduled Task. These credentials are used to run the Exchange Online Assessment.

    ScheduledTaskUsername:  
ScheduledTaskPassword:
WorkspaceId:

    Note

    The account used to set up the assessment task needs to be a local admin in the Machine; it can be a local account or a Domain account with local admin right on the Machine.

    If you're using a local account, just enter the account name and password. If you're using a domain account, use the format Domain\Account.

    <WorkspaceID> - provide ID for the Log Analytics workspace that will be used to store the uploaded data

    Note

    The account needs to be the same as the sign-in account on the machine.

  6. When the setup is completed, the following messages are shown.

    [ExchangeOnlineAssessment]Task Creation Successful.  
[ExchangeOnlineAssessment]ExchangeOnlineAssessment setup successful.  
[ExchangeOnlineAssessment]Detailed log at: C:/\****.log  
[ExchangeOnlineAssessment][2804]To receive continued assessment updates, please close this Powershell Windows

  7. Close the PowerShell window.

  8. Open the Task Scheduler.

  9. Expand [Task Scheduler]-[Task Scheduler Library]-[Microsoft]-[Operations Management Suite]-[AOI-***]-[Assessments]-[ExchangeOnlineAssessment].

  10. You can confirm the "ExchangeOnlineAssessment" task on the right pane.

  11. Data collection is triggered within an hour of you running the previous script, then again every seven days. You can modify the to run on a different date/time or force it to run immediately.

  12. Right-click on the task and select Run.

    Note

    During collection and analysis, data is temporarily stored under the WorkingDirectory folder that was configured during setup, using the following structure:

    C:\EXOA
    |-- ExchangeOnlineAssessment
        |-- [Numbered Folder] ==> # Data Collection Folder
        |-- Logs  
        |-- Omsassessment

  13. If MFA is in use for your data collection account, you need to also manually collect data from Office 365 as often as you require. Perform this collection by running the following PowerShell script:

    C:\EXOA
|-- ExchangeOnlineAssessment
    |-- [Numbered Folder]
        |-- Temp
            |-- Exchange.Office 365
                |-- EXO_Master.ps1

    You need to enter the credentials for the Office 365 account and respond to the MFA prompt. Once the PowerShell script is finished, run the Scheduled Task again to refresh the collected data.

  14. Data collection is triggered by the scheduled task named ExchangeOnlineAssessment within an hour of running the previous script and then every 7 days. The task can be modified to run on a different date/time or even forced to run immediately from the task scheduler library

    Microsoft
    |-- Operations Management Suite
        |-- AOI-[XXX]
            |-- Assessments
                |-- ExchangeOnlineAssessment

  15. During collection and analysis, data is temporarily stored under the Working Directory folder that was configured during setup

  16. After a few minutes, your assessment results will be available on your Log Analytics and Services Hub Dashboard. You can navigate to see the results by going into:

    Services Hub  
    |-- Health
        |-- Assessments
            |-- View All Assessments