The digital transformation of organizations mainly relies on a fundamental first step: teams endorsing process digitalization and firstly the workspace. In this digital workplace, providing Office 365 plays a full part in the adoption of these new practices. Monitoring the digital workplace (and therefore Office 365) has become essential for employees, even more so during the public health crisis where teleworking has soared. In this article, you will learn how to integrate the monitoring of the Office 365 suite into your Centreon monitoring console, thus delivering an exclusive digital experience to users.
Monitoring Office 365 and the digital workplace, towards a digital transformation of companies
Before the public health crisis, 46% of Europeans would sometimes work from home. Health restrictions have been accelerating the trend towards teleworking. The generalization of teleworking has established strong expectations in terms of quality of service delivered. We must move towards Smart Monitoring, allowing ITOps teams to monitor teleworking, firstly Office 365, from a single console combining all the indicators of the information system.
As you can see, times are changing and teleworking has highlighted the need for smart monitoring of the Office 365 suite (beyond the famous Skype and Teams video-conferencing tools).
Now we must go beyond monitoring the availability of the connection, and manage the performance of the famous suite in real time, provide global visibility of the entire IT system and correlate data from multiple applications, be it in the Cloud or in the company’s server room.
This is where Centreon comes into play to integrate the metrics of Office 365 into your monitoring console in order to remove blind spots and to update monitoring in real time with the auto-discovery functions.
Monitoring Office 365 with Centreon: beyond availability, monitoring the use and consumption of services
Office 365 includes monitoring tools for every service offered (messaging, video-conferencing, spreadsheet and so on). Office 365 monitoring is no different from legacy infrastructure or Edge Computing monitoring as it relies on dedicated Centreon Plugin Packs monitoring the use made out of each of the Office 365 services. The issue is not so much availability as the performance of the application because the Microsoft Azure infrastructure ensures a high availability rate (even though its monitoring should not be overlooked!). The key for ITOps is to monitor the use made of the different services offered: the storage space used by mailboxes, the growth rate of OneDrive space, the number of Teams users and so on. This information is made available by Microsoft through an Office 365 management API. Centreon will rely on this API to access the necessary metrics in order to “transmit” the most relevant indicators within the console.
The first Plugin Pack effect: Integrating Office 365 indicators in Centreon for a global and precise view of your digital workplace
The first step is to authorize access to the Office 365 management API by Centreon. To do this, simply register your Centreon platform in Azure Active Directory and configure the rights to authorize access to the API. Once you have your Client ID and Client Secret, you can use the Office 365 Plugin Packs provided by Centreon.
The second step is to install the Office 365 Plugin Packs from the Plugin Pack Manager.
The second Plugin Pack effect: optimizing the use and consumption of Office 365
You can then access numerous metrics regarding the performance of the different services and their level of use:
- Exchange (number of active mailboxes, number of emails read, received and sent, mailbox capacities and so on),
- OneDrive (number of active sites, number of files and so on),
- Sharepoint (number of active sites, capacity of active sites, number of pages visited or viewed, number of files synchronized and so on),
- Skype (number of active users, number of devices connected by type of terminal, number of sessions and conferences and so on)
- Teams (number of active users, number of connected web browsers, number and type of equipment connected, number of collaborative chats, number of meetings and so on)
These metrics are particularly useful for monitoring the performance of the suite in cockpits and visual dashboards that can be easily shared with users. They are also useful for optimizing the use and consumption of these services, ultimately optimizing the generated costs.
With the Office 365 Plugin Pack, you have everything you need to connect Centreon to the Office 365 monitoring service and ensure effective, efficient monitoring! Try it yourself!
Learn more about Office 365 monitoring with Centreon
- Tutorial: monitoring Microsoft Office 365 with Centreon
- Centreon documentation
- Centreon registration on Office 365
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