Lesson 3: Microsoft Office 365. How Do I Deal With It?

Welcome to Lesson 3, and thanks for sticking with us so far. Hopefully, the previous lessons on automated alert actions
and configuring monitoring for applications you’re less familiar with have been helpful. Today, I want to dive into a more
specific use case: monitoring Microsoft® Office 365®.

Many companies have made the transition from on-premises Microsoft applications to the Microsoft Office 365
solution. What does this mean for your monitoring, though? Effectively, your on-premises monitoring won’t work
anymore.

Why not? Many things are different, including the most fundamental to monitoring: the methods you can use to access
the data. This means your former methods of monitoring your critical Microsoft applications on-premises are going to
return unknown or error values, as the data is no longer accessible via these methods.

This presents several challenges for monitoring engineers.

For your on-premises Office implementation, you likely monitored it with a combination of WMI, performance counters,
and maybe a PowerShell script or two. With Office 365, these same monitors won’t be able to get you the information
you expect. You may be able to rework existing PowerShell monitors if you have them, but otherwise, it calls for a net-
new monitoring configuration.

So what do you need? In a word, PowerShell.

Now, you may not be a master with PowerShell, and you may be thinking you now have to spend time learning
PowerShell. This would certainly be helpful, but hopefully your monitoring solution has once again anticipated you
aren’t a master of all things. Hopefully, some lovely person has already built a solution for you requiring something less
than total mastery of PowerShell.

The SolarWinds® Orion® Platform, for example, provides out-of-the-box monitoring templates (and even a dashboard) for
you, and they require minimal effort. These scripts were originally built by one of our community members, so I
encourage you to check the THWACK® community for monitoring contributions to help supplement your own efforts.

Let’s start with Exchange. Some of the critical information your administrators will need to monitor may include mailbox
sizes, mobile users, inactive users, etc. Luckily, this information can be received and alerted on through your monitoring
platform utilizing PowerShell. The data may look something like this:
Now, we can quickly look at what you want to monitor for your OneDrive® implementation on Office 365. You’ll want to
at least monitor the storage capacity to ensure your teams don’t run out of space. With PowerShell queries, you can
monitor this statistic as well as others. This may look like this:
Finally, let’s look at one of the favored Office 365 apps this year, Teams®. Again, PowerShell is your friend for gaining
insight into what is now a critical application, as remote work has become a priority. Utilizing the out-of-the-box
template, you can get statistics like these:

This information is valuable for managing these applications, especially with an eye toward the costs associated with
them. Receiving an alert when your OneDrive capacity is approaching the current limit can save a lot of phone calls to
the help desk because employees can’t store new documents. These statistics are intended to give you insights similar to
the ones you had with your on-premises Office solution.
This was just a glimpse into monitoring Office 365, and at SolarWinds, we also provide templates for monitoring
SharePoint® Online, Skype®, Skype for Business, and more. Check the resource links below for full information. If what
you need isn’t readily available, creating a custom monitoring template is also an option.

As this is a cloud-based solution, you may also want to consider configuring some network connection testing to ensure
notification when the service goes down for any period. In the SolarWinds Orion Platform, you can achieve this through
NetPath™. This service traces all possible routes from the source point to the destination—in this case, Office 365. This
will let you know when a connection failure is a problem and at what point the failure occurred (aka who or what’s to
blame).

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s lesson on monitoring applications with agent vs. agentless polling. This lesson will take you
through the pros and cons of monitoring your applications and their server hosts via both methods.

For further information, please check out the resources below. We also encourage you to visit the THWACK community
and the demo for ideas.

• SolarWinds Lab™ Episode 32: Two Geeks and a Goddess

• SolarWinds Lab Episode 86: Orion SDK 101: Intro to PowerShell and Orion API
• Working With Office 365 via PowerShell
• SolarWinds Orion Platform Documentation
o Create a NetPath Service in NPM
o SAM Templates: Microsoft Office 365
o PowerShell Scripting in SAM Component Monitors

Best,
Chrystal