Microsoft 365 Observability is essential to your team’s productivity

Microsoft 365 is the most popular SaaS application in the industry today. For Microsoft, the move to a SaaS model was inevitable. There are millions of users across the globe relying on Microsoft for communication and collaboration. And every organization has multiple instances of Microsoft 365 running across different locations. When your employees rely on Microsoft 365 to be productive, it’s essential to monitor Microsoft 365.

The shift to SaaS has been a game changer in the IT industry. Enterprises find it easier to deploy multiple instances of a SaaS solution instead of setting up and maintaining such solutions in-house. Microsoft 365 has managed to claim a major portion of the SaaS user base. The popularity of Microsoft 365 can be attributed to—

• The range of applications Microsoft 365 provides, from communication and collaboration to data storage.
• Microsoft 365 connects employees from different branches across the globe. This improves productivity by saving the time employees would spend on business trips.
• Microsoft 365 makes it easier to back up data as every application saves data automatically and employees can access everything related to their work from anywhere.
• Organizations find the Microsoft 365 subscription model more economical and flexible.

Microsoft is responsible for maintaining the performance of its applications, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also be measuring its performance. SaaS monitoring is usually overlooked and not considered a high priority. But SaaS services, like any other online application, are susceptible to performance degradation and can be easily impacted by factors outside the organization and within the application delivery chain.

Do you need Microsoft 365 observability?

Although Microsoft 365 is popular for the ease of deployment, it is complex with several external dependencies. Not having an observability solution in place to watch over application performance leaves IT departments in the dark since:

• They have no access to performance data, and therefore, are unable to verify or troubleshoot the issue.
• There is no hard data for IT admins can generate to demand answers from the cloud provider.
• They are unable to identify SLA breaches, so they cannot hold the cloud provider accountable.
• It is not possible to determine if the organization is getting value for the amount spent on each application.

What could go wrong?

Microsoft 365's apps are easy to deploy and manage, but service performance depends on factors such as:

• The network or the application delivery path
• The organization’s intranet, firewall configuration, and other restrictions within the company network
• Third party dependencies
• The IT infrastructure of the organization

With so many different variables in the application delivery chain, the probability of performance degradation is high.

Take control of Microsoft 365 performance

It is easy to let SaaS providers handle performance issues, but we would be taking a big risk given the different components and variables that make up the service itself. Microsoft 365 is crucial to the day-to-day activities of a typical employee at any organization, from Outlook to Sharepoint to Teams.

Let us take the example of an organization with locations in New York and San Francisco. How does the IT team ensure that the MS365 instance deployed in the New York office and the San Francisco office is performing optimally? And how do you measure the impact of these applications on employee productivity?

A comprehensive SaaS observability solution will answer these questions. Monitoring the performance of Office 365 is essential because:

• It gives you visibility into all components and processes in the service. The performance data helps detect issues quickly and provides much-needed insight into performance trends and areas that need optimization. Plus, it eliminates blind spots in the application delivery chain.
• SaaS observability identifies SLA breaches. The data will be useful when you raise the issue with Microsoft support service or even demand compensation as per Microsoft’s SLA.
• Monitoring MS365 instances will help you evaluate the IT infrastructure in different office locations. So, you will be able to optimize the network better to deliver a uniform end-user experience, irrespective of the user’s location.
• Teams can address issues as soon as they receive alerts. In case of an outage or downtime, you can keep employees informed so they don’t overwhelm the IT helpdesk.

Conclusion

SaaS observability aims to ensure a positive end-user experience. An application that is slow or takes time to process data will only waste an employee’s time and make the workflow less efficient. Most organizations use Microsoft 365 for email, internal chat, data storage, and sharing. Employee productivity can be impacted if any of these applications fail to function or slows down.

If you do not have a monitoring strategy in place for your MS365 applications, then you are more or less in the dark when it comes to measuring the performance of these applications. The performance of the application directly impacts employee productivity, so you end up compromising both end-user experience and productivity.

Catchpoint launched SaaS monitors specifically created for Microsoft 365 applications. Now, you can quickly set up multiple tests and alerts without having to build complex scripts.