Amongst the many announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2018, one that caught my attention was a press release from eG Innovations. At Ignite 2018, eG Innovations has now introduced several new features to their enterprise monitoring for Microsoft 365 (M365). I was able to get a demo of the new capabilities, of which we will highlight a few here today.
The(M365) offering has come a long way since its introduction to enterprises and has exceeded its 120 million adoption rate from last year. According to IDC, 500 companies have purchased Office 365 in the past 12 months. As enterprises move into this cloud-focused world administrators are not off the hook for monitoring their environments. When users are reporting slowness or an outage, administrators must know exactly what is going on in their environments to ensure that leadership can properly communicate any issues the enterprise could be facing. Microsoft offers monitoring in their offering but depending on which aspect of you are looking at the information is often decentralized and can take some time to analyze.
This article will give a summary of the Microsoft application and infrastructure monitoring capabilities of eG Innovations’ flagship monitoring solution eG Enterprise. The goal being to pull all this information into a single pane of glass for a simple holistic view of what is happening in the enterprise environment even for M365 cloud workloads. Let’s dive into these new aspects to monitoring with eG Innovations while taking a real-world look into their value and benefits to your enterprise for M365 monitoring.
New! eG Innovations solution monitoring features
Microsoft Exchange Online – Whether your enterprise has email deployed on-premises or to the cloud understanding how email is functioning from the user perspective is invaluable to the business. Imagine getting that 3 am call that email isn’t functioning right. Where to begin can be a challenge. Questions such as the following running through your mind and searching quickly to find answers:
- Does this impact one user or many? If more than one is it a certain group or region?
- Are all your network resources and connectivity to Office 365 online?
- Is your Office 365 tenant, as a whole, being impacted?
- Which Exchange mailboxes nearing capacity?
- How much mail traffic being sent/received? How much of it is spam?
- Are any user accounts locked out?
- Are there any user reported error messages?
These are just a few of the questions you may be asking and having a single pane of glass to answer these questions quickly will go a long way for the root cause and communications surrounding your email issue at hand.
See figure 1 below that quickly highlights mail traffic KPIs for Exchange Online.
SharePoint Online monitoring
What do you do when your enterprise users call in and start reporting that your corporate Intranet that runs SharePoint is slow? Especially when deployed in the cloud this can be hard to troubleshoot. Being able to confirm any performance issues quickly allows administrators to dive into the problem, quickly communicate the issue to the business, and reach out to Microsoft for problem resolution.
See figure 2 below which quickly highlights which SharePoint URLs are slow, helps triage problems more quickly, and assesses overall user satisfaction of performance of your websites.
Plus, eG Innovations also provides deep insights into SharePoint Online performance, including SharePoint site administration, synchronization, and sharing and access request operations, resource usage and content growth of site collections, user logon and authentication status, and more.
Azure Server Monitoring
When administrators have servers to monitor in the cloud, gaining insights into what is going on can natively be configured alert you. Also, natively, administrators can go into each individual server in Azure to check its performance metrices. Both are manual and decentralized from other aspects of M365 monitoring. Using eG Innovations for Azure monitoring, your servers can be evaluated through a single pane of glass, allowing for easy detection of resource issues. More importantly resource usage can be evaluated, and proactive steps can be taken be more thoughtful with resources which can equate to saving money on compute resources long-term.
eG Enterprise automatically detects application workloads running on Azure and monitors and correlates the performance of the application with the underlying Azure infrastructure to help detect where the root cause of problems lies.
See figure 3 below, which shows a topology of a hybrid IT infrastructure where eG Innovations automatically detected a .NET application running on Azure and auto-correlated the performance across the entire IT environment. Drilling in further will reveal performance of the .NET application and the Azure cloud instance.
Concluding thoughts
There are many great features that have been added to the eG Innovations monitoring solution to extend monitoring to Microsoft environments in addition to monitoring for Microsoft 365. Consistent monitoring views across on-premises, cloud or hybrid IT environments help unify IT performance monitoring end to end. The layer model representation of metrics and end-to-end topology maps help quickly isolate your enterprise IT problems, avoid the finger pointing and get right to where the root cause actually is.
Sponsored by eG Innovations
To learn more about eG Innovations’ Office 365 monitoring capabilities visit www.eginnovations.com/Office365. eG Innovations provides full stack visibility your Microsoft environment, including Windows servers and desktops, SQL, IIS, AD, Hyper-V virtualization, Exchange, SharePoint, Dynamics, Azure cloud, and more. The recent addition of .NET application performance monitoring functionality provides transaction tracing and code-level visibility into web applications.
