CloudReady’s New Office 365 Service Communications Features

Integration with Microsoft’s API gives you a unique 3D view into the health of your Office 365 serviceExoprise CloudReady was designed from the ground-up to provide IT teams with insight into the health and performance of cloud-based apps and services by integrating monitoring data from multiple sources:  locally deployed sensors measuring performance from real user locations, sensors deployed at Exoprise-managed sites, and aggregate performance data from other cloud-app users (a.k.a. “the crowd”).

Today we are happy to announce that IT teams managing Office 365 will now have direct access to service and incident status information from Microsoft, integrated into their CloudReady admin experience, making it easier than ever to quickly detect and pinpoint root causes of Office 365 service issues, whether they are local, in the ISP chain, or in their Office 365 tenant.  This new capability comes via CloudReady’s direct integration with Microsoft’s updated Service Communications API, which was released into public preview this week.

CloudReady’s new Office 365 Dashboard template includes two new “tiles” displaying data published by Microsoft via the API.  One presents current and historical service status information and the other presents the list of recent service incidents.

Future updates will also incorporate subsets of this data within sensor detail screens (e.g. Exchange Online pages will incorporate service status and incident data related to that particular service) and allow admins to trigger alarms based on service/incident status changes.

As with Microsoft’s own <Service Health Dashboard>, data displayed in these new tiles is specific to an Office 365 tenant.  This is accomplished by “registering” the CloudReady user account with one or more Office 365 tenants via the open standard for authorization (OAuth) using a new option on the CloudReady user profile page.

Microsoft is definitely prioritizing the needs of IT teams by providing monitoring and management API’s like the Service Communications API and the Management Activity API that was launched at the RSA Conference earlier this year.  We’re excited about these API’s and the features we’re able to add to CloudReady using them.  Give them a try and let us know what you think!