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Easy-to-read "stoplight" system
ENow features an intuitive "stoplight" system for visualizing where issues exist, allowing admins to zero in on the problem. While ENow doesn't monitor every nuance of Microsoft 365, it monitors the services and metrics that are genuinely needed and cuts through the noise to see where the problem lies.
Below, you can see that ENow surfaces issues, including an outage happening with Exchange Online.
ENow provides an intuitive stoplight visualization system for pinpointing problems
After drilling down into the Exchange Online indicator above, you can see an issue with Exchange Online in further detail, including that it is affecting a remote office in New York.
Pinpointing an Exchange Online outage
Synthetic transactions
ENow's Microsoft 365 Monitoring & Reporting solution uses over 95 synthetic transactions. These mimic end-user behaviors with Microsoft 365 apps, enabling realistic testing of key functionality and going beyond simple service reachability checks.
For instance, one synthetic transaction tests the ability to create and post to a Microsoft Teams channel, while others test the ability to send and receive mail via Exchange Online, as shown above. It also uses synthetic transactions to monitor Azure AD Connect and user synchronization.
Viewing the status of AAD synchronization
Hybrid component and network monitoring
ENow proactively monitors hybrid components, providing an early warning when these components are reaching a critical state or when certificate expiration is imminent. The tool also scans your network to determine whether it is preventing connectivity to Microsoft 365. This feature is handy, with more users working from home.
ENow Microsoft 365 Monitoring & Reporting enables real-time service updates for Microsoft services pulled from their service health APIs. They even pull in tweets from @MSFT365Status directly to the ENow Dashboard, helping to gain visibility into real-world reports of issues with services. The @MSFT365Status Twitter handle is an important source of real-time information about outages and degraded cloud services.
Service Status Dashboard pulls tweets directly from @MSFT365Status
Reporting and dashboard customization
ENow's reporting library has over 100 Microsoft 365 reports covering administration, adoption, governance, and license optimization. You can schedule and deliver these reports to key stakeholders, such as company executives, specific Microsoft 365 workloads, and department managers.
The out-of-box reports provided are not the same as Microsoft 365 native reports. They provide views of critical tenant information that are either not available natively from Microsoft 365 admin centers or require manual effort to combine data from multiple reports across different admin centers. There are reports for every core Microsoft 365 workload and for Microsoft 365 SLA tracking.
ENow provides extensive reporting capabilities and built in Microsoft 365 reports across multiple workloads
License optimization
ENow offers a license optimization module that provides insights into license consumption rates by license type over various timeframes. With this feature, you can gain insight into the license count of specific groups or departments. In addition, you can drill down into specific Microsoft 365 apps to evaluate their usage.
For instance, if you have a pool of underutilized licenses for Microsoft Teams, ENow's license optimization can identify these opportunities for cost savings. Organizations can realize significant cost savings and maximize their investment in Microsoft 365 by reallocating or decommissioning underused licenses.
Candidates for License Optimization Report
Below is a look at ENow's Over Licensed Users report, which displays users with overprovisioned licensing.
ENow Microsoft 365 License Optimization module helps you find over licensed users
Governance reporting
ENow also offers a variety of governance reports. Knowing how employees use certain features of workloads is important, because organizations understand that effective security policies must be implemented consistently across the enterprise to protect Microsoft information systems.
ENow can help your organization gain more visibility into Microsoft Teams, Exchange, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive usage. These reports help detect Microsoft Teams sprawl and understand who is accessing your organization's resources and how. It features a new report pack with over 30 reports, including folders and files shared internally and externally for SharePoint Online and OneDrive Sites. Use complementary reports based on who has accessed the resources that were shared with them.
Microsoft Teams call quality
Numerous factors can affect Microsoft Teams call quality, and diagnosing these problems can be challenging. ENow's Microsoft Teams Monitoring & Reporting assesses call quality using Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) metrics, providing insights into performance over the past month, week, and day. It also collects feedback directly from your users, providing a holistic view of the call quality experience from the end-user perspective. ENow's Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard gives you a concise view of Teams' performance.
Teams Call Quality report
ENow includes specific functionality to support VIPs using Teams. It enables you to monitor any executive in real time, identifying the root cause of poor calls, and finding insights into what is causing issues.
ENow can monitor your VIPs Teams call quality
The ENow Call Quality Support Portal also assists service desk personnel in troubleshooting specific user issues without having to drill into the overwhelming Microsoft Teams CQD. Admins can gain insight into a user's poor calls and conferences and see the commonalities with these poor calls with metrics such as location, ISP, connection type, client version, and Microsoft "front door" information.
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Overview of poor Microsoft Teams calls
Wrapping up
ENow Microsoft 365 Monitoring & Reporting is a comprehensive solution that identifies and addresses problems and provides businesses with the tools to detect issues with their Microsoft cloud environment proactively. It offers a single-pane-of-glass view of your entire environment, synthetic transactions for realistic testing, proactive monitoring of hybrid components, and extensive reporting capabilities for license optimization, governance, and Teams call quality management. By using intuitive dashboards and proactive alerting, administrators can stay ahead of any potential usage issues within their organization's Microsoft 365 account.
