Monitoring Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 deployments include a combination of highly complex components, such as Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, AAD Connect, and more. Therefore, although unlikely, a failure at any time cannot be ruled out. The interdependence of the various M365 elements often makes it hard to retain an overview of the deployment when taken as a whole. In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, your Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard may tell you there are no issues, yet users send tickets, saying they have difficulty logging in to their SharePoint.
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack simplifies this complexity. It discovers and reveals performance issues tracked down to users, groups, mailboxes, locations, devices, you name it.
What is Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 combines best-in-class productivity apps with powerful cloud services, device management, and advanced security in one, connected experience. While Office 2019 came with essentials such as Word, Excel, OneNote, and Skype, Microsoft 365 now includes apps such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange Online, and many more.
Visualize Microsoft 365 Performance
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack Auto-Discovery reveals and maps out your entire hybrid and cloud-only deployment.
It lists components from the Tenant, down to the Users, SharePoint sub-sites, Teams channels, OneDrive folders, and Exchange queues. Get quick insights into the performance of your deployment for Microsoft 365. This includes Licensing, Users, the Health States of the Identity Service, Mobile Device Management for Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Portal, Microsoft 365 Client Applications, and the Microsoft Current Secure Score.
On top of that, you can use any dashboarding solution, such as Power BI, within your System Center environment, to build stunning dashboards. There is also a free M365 community dashboard that comes with the SquaredUp Community Edition.
Monitoring Microsoft 365 Services
“Microsoft 365 is a SaaS offering that includes Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and more. As a customer, we need to know if the purchased service works as promised. Highly recommend this NiCE Active 365 Management Pack for SCOM!”
Infrastructure Architect for I&O,
Global Packaging Provider
Monitoring Microsoft 365
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack integrates 360° monitoring of business-vital Microsoft 365 services, such as Teams, SharePoint, Azure AD Connect, and more into Microsoft System Center, allowing you to track, alert, visualize, cross-reference, escalate, report, and predict latencies.
Teams, SpO, OD, ExO, AADC
Master Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and Azure AD Connect availability and performance. Drill down into any tenant, location, user, or licensing for a complete picture of the entire Microsoft 365 service health. Use integrated application knowledge to pinpoint and solve issues prior to users’ complaints.
Pre-built Plug & Play Monitoring
The NiCE Management Pack comes with pre-built monitors, alert views, and probes feeding data into performance views and graphs to give you holistic insights into Microsoft 365 operations. Root-cause analysis and correlating issues for fast and profound resolutions have never been easier.
NiCE Management Packs for Monitoring Microsoft 365
M365 Tenant Monitoring
M365 Tenant Performance Monitoring directly operates on all related applications and users. The NiCE Management Pack gives you a secure, 360°-degree view of every aspect of the M365 deployment and the performance of every single object.
SharePoint Monitoring
Microsoft SharePoint is a powerful collaborative platform used for document and content management. The NiCE Management Pack helps you ensure top SharePoint performance and availability by tracing your deployment’s latencies, storage consumption, and other vital parts.
Teams Monitoring
Microsoft Teams is the place for chats, video, and audio meetings. Make sure Teams itself and all its components work like a charm. Reports on basic latencies and in-depth Teams Call Quality data provide you with every insight needed to take immediate action.
Exchange Monitoring
Microsoft Exchange services center your company’s email messaging, calendar, and task handling. The NiCE Management Pack provides actionable insights into every level of your Exchange deployment to ensure user expectations and business operations goals are met.
OneDrive Monitoring
OneDrive for Business is a managed cloud storage for file hosting, sharing, and synchronization. For example, the availability and performance of file upload times are crucial for user satisfaction. The Management Pack traces, reports, and alerts on OneDrive latencies and helps you address issues fast.
Azure Active Directory Monitoring
Azure AD Connect is the magic wand for synchronizing user credentials between on-prem and cloud systems to enable a standard user logon. The Management Pack traces any user profile sync anomalies and reports them to you, so you can make sure your user and apps have access.
Monitoring M365 High Availability & Multi-Tenant Environments
HA Monitoring
Monitoring High Availability is achieved by having a collector on two SCOM servers for redundancy in the management group. Achieve a three-server quorum where the database acts as an arbiter and a host for log and configuration files.
Multi-Tenant Ready
In Multi-tenancy, a single software application instance serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant.
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack can handle up to 30 tenants per collector.
Minimal Load
A Management Group is the logical entity where all objects and data are stored in SCOM. The NiCE Management Pack provides most efficient monitoring by keeping its workload minimal, so no other objects are affected.
Ready to Scale
For a retail business with many shop locations, it is key to ensure all locations have connection to the M365 services. Identify locations with low M365 performance quickly and reduce the mean time to recovery.
Auto-Discover all Microsoft 365 Components and Services
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack Auto-Discovery reveals and maps out your entire hybrid and cloud-only deployment. It lists components from the Tenant down to the Users, SharePoint sub-sites, Teams Channels, OneDrive folders, and Exchange queues.
Monitor Your Microsoft 365 Licensing
Monitoring M365 License Expiry
The NiCE Management Pack allows you to know up to ten days in advance that a particular license will expire. The license expiry monitoring is performed for Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and AAD Connect.
Integrated Azure License Plan State View
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager provides you with an Azure License Plan state view, as an easy way to see your Azure license plans setup.
License Plan Discovery & Monitoring
Discover and monitor your Microsoft 365 license plans, report on the number of Active Users, Active & Consumed Licenses, and Licenses in a Warning state, as well as the available licenses for each subscribed SKU.
Easy Reporting for Microsoft 365, including SLA and OLA Reports
Easily get detailed reports on Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange usage, including licensing, AAD synchronization, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and Operation Level Agreements (OLAs).
All reporting data is stored in your existing System Center data warehouse. With the reporting engines available in your environment, you can report on M365 adoption, mailbox migrations, Microsoft 365 license usage, and more.
Setup & Configure Microsoft 365 Service Monitoring with Ease
Start monitoring your Microsoft 365 services within minutes. The setup via SCOM is super easy as the included auto-discovery detects all M365 monitoring components in your tenant for you. Once the entire environment is discovered, data starts coming in based on the default thresholds. Pick and choose which threshold to change or add to refine the data streams to your business cases.
Applying the Highest Security Standards when Monitoring Microsoft 365
Security Aware by Permission-based Building Blocks
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack is built with the “principle of least privilege” and uses different permission-level building blocks according to the sensitivity of the monitored data.
The building block approach of the NiCE Active 365 Management Pack allows for compliant, secure, well-organized, and reportable access to monitoring sensitive data. Each building block has pre-defined minimal access rights, allowing for highly granular, yet de-personalized real-world user data.
Configuration & Hardening for Secure M365 Monitoring
The Microsoft Graph-based collection mechanism and the building block approach enable a straightforward and secure implementation and setup.
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack uses one single configuration file for all product components. Further security-relevant settings in the Azure Tenant can be monitored. This includes, for example, if application secrets are about to expire, or if enterprise applications are configured so that they are visible to all users.
Double-Protected Application Secrets in M365 Monitoring
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack ensures the Application Secrets are stored outside SCOM. Application Secrets are the key to accessing the Service Principal in Azure to run Graph API requests, being the gateway to all data. Losing the Application Secrets would raise significant security concerns.
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack approach ensures Application Secrets do not get lost, passed on, or could be otherwise compromised.
Sealed & Secured Microsoft 365 Data Collection
Only the NiCE Collector (TCRC) can access M365 data for security compliance. The Collector itself is sealed and secured. The TCRC is located in your Azure tenant and subscription, so you have complete and sole authority over the deployment and records. The records are located in the Cosmo DB inside Azure.
The TCRC springs to life upon a change notification, which extracts, processes, and mirrors the consolidated data into SCOM. The NiCE Management Pack does not see any personal data stored in the call records. It displays the processed, aggregated data.
Secrets and connection data are stored in the Azure Key Vault, to make them as safe as can be.
Embedded Microsoft 365 Secure Score Monitoring
The NiCE Active 365 Management Pack integrates Secure Score monitoring into SCOM. This gives you new possibilities, such as additional alerting options, as well as status- and drill-down-to-source views. Having these options at hand will give you a much better understanding of cross-structural security issues. On top of that, reporting will be much easier.
What is Microsoft Secure Score?
Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization’s security posture. Lower numbers indicate additional improvement actions need to be taken. It can be found at https://security.microsoft.com/securescore in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal.
Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices.
Self-Monitoring Ensures Best Possible Integrity
The inbuilt self-monitoring of all NiCE Management Packs ensures all data is captured and processed as defined so that there is no monitoring, graphing, or reporting gaps.
NiCE IT Management Solutions is a long-term Microsoft Business Partner with Gold status for Application Development and Datacenter.
Start advanced Microsoft 365 SharePoint Monitoring now
Microsoft SharePoint Online is a powerful web-based collaborative platform integrating into Microsoft 365. It is used for document and content management, internal social platforms, and for creating web applications. About 80% of Fortune 500 companies and over 200 million users in total rely on SharePoint.