When internal IT teams are responsible for ensuring service uptime, it becomes a challenge with cloud applications like Teams – especially when you don’t know the root cause of an outage. The reality for most organizations relying on Microsoft Teams and other Office 365 cloud services is that there’s an innate expectation that service availability is going to be met; Microsoft has enough redundant infrastructure to ensure they can meet their 99.9% service level agreement.

Written by Nick Cavalancia, Microsoft Cloud & Datacenter MVP The need for visibility into service availability and delivery quality has led to the rise in interest in monitoring Microsoft’s Office 365 services from the user perspective. With two different approaches available, what value do they each bring?

Over a year after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the hope of speaking about it in the past tense is something we all still hold on to. Not only are we still being challenged by it in the present, but it has changed the way we think and do many things. However, just because something has become normalized over time (out of necessity) doesn’t mean that everyone has adjusted without incident.

You are at your desk, when all of a sudden there seems to be a hum that is growing louder, your heart starts to pound and you quickly realize that you might be in the midst of another Microsoft outage. You know that right now, Microsoft is your organization‘s core workforce engine and the backbone to ensure productivity - any outage or decrease in service quality can cause widespread productivity declines.

Until recently, work has been thought of as a place you go, rather than a thing you do. While cloud technology has made a ‘digital workplace’ possible, for many businesses, this has been a long-term ambition. But what happens when this changes overnight? Suddenly more people are at home than in the office, and the typical 9-5 model doesn’t apply anymore. This is the reality that businesses the world over had to face head-on a year ago when the pandemic hit.

In an industry where technological evolution is commonplace, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of terminology and acronyms. It’s important to establish a solid foundation of understanding. In the second installment of our ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ series, we tackle issues related to effective monitoring, speed, and performance related to Microsoft 365 services.