When it comes to Application Performance Management (APM), there are two main technologies used to measure end-user perspective performance: synthetic monitoring (STM) and real user monitoring (RUM). We’ll discuss the pros and cons of each of the technologies especially related to monitoring third-party apps. Third-party apps like Office 365 and GSuite are experiencing a surge of growth for mission-critical purposes within business.

Microsoft Windows Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) is a cloud service that provides administrators with the ability to manage end-user identities and access privileges. When you use Office 365, Microsoft Azure, or Intune you are indirectly interacting with AAD which they use to manage all of their identities, authentication and permissions.

Exoprise recently released two new CloudReady sensors for monitoring Transport Layer Security (TLS), aka Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), connections end-to-end. TLS/SSL is the foundation for just about every web request and transaction across the Internet today. Arguably, SSL is as important as TCP/IP itself to the formation of our modern-day Internet, SaaS and Cloud world.

Exoprise recently released new storage sensors for end-to-end monitoring and testing of Azure Blob or Amazon S3. These sensors, once deployed against a container, enable continuous monitoring of access performance, uptime and availability of Azure Blob storage or Amazon S3. They enable network and storage administrators to test network capacity, latency and effective bandwidth to the various object store regions and datacenters that support the stores.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a mainstream way of bringing enterprise applications to hundreds of thousands of application users at a stable cost. Rather than loading client software on a desktop PC, we lease software from the cloud, and monitor how the SaaS application is delivered. That makes it available to everyone in the enterprise.

Salesforce.com is an essential mission-critical application for many enterprises. Because it is only delivered through the cloud, its performance is highly dependent upon where it is being served from, accessed from, end-to-end network characteristics and type of usage within in an enterprise.

Microsoft recently released a Proof of Concept (POC) for a new tool, the Office 365 Network Performance tool, that shows you the network latency to the nearest Office 365 service “front door” when you input a location.

This is the fourth and final article of a series on the CloudReady dashboards and visualizations. With a better understanding of the various widgets available, you can build custom dashboards that cover the end user experience for any application delivered to a branch office or location.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and Office 365 suffered their second major outage of the year and this one was even bigger than the first. We say “unfortunately” because even though our business is to help monitor cloud and SaaS services and our business goes up when there are problems, we don’t wish an outage on any cloud provider. Operating a SaaS business at the scale of Microsoft Office 365 is a herculean task and that’s why they get paid the big bucks.

DNS, the Domain Name Service, is the Internet service that translates IP addresses into hostnames, and visa versa. It enables you to type www.exoprise.com in a browser, or send an email to someone at that domain, and have your request actually go to 35.172.52.247. As a vital part of the Internet infrastructure, DNS attacks can have a serious impact on your online operations, including access to your website and email.