Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The M365 suite is vast, and the mountains of data that accumulate within each application are huge and ongoing. While data reporting is a necessity, management can feel unwieldy. Luckily, there is an array of reporting software on the market to support this challenge. This blog explores three powerful tools for M365 reporting: SquaredUp, Microsoft 365's native reporting tool, and Power BI.

InfluxDB is a powerful open-source time-series database widely used for monitoring system performance, IoT metrics, and application telemetry. With SquaredUp's InfluxDB plugin, you can effortlessly visualize and monitor your InfluxDB data, gaining real-time insights into your metrics alongside your other tools and services. This guide will walk you through connecting InfluxDB with SquaredUp, creating dashboards, setting up monitoring, and sharing your visualizations.

Most engineering teams today have a multiplicity of tools to meet all of the different challenges they face. Some people characterize this as a problem and describe it as 'tool sprawl'. At SquaredUp, we just see it as a fact of life that no tool can excel at every job and engineers will want to choose the best tool for each task. Many companies have multiple toolchains spread across different teams and departments.

If you are a DevOps manager you will be keenly aware that the role involves managing multiple toolchains across different clouds, platforms and environments. You also need to report on KPIs, DORA metrics, governance, security and a lot more. At SquaredUp, we understand these demands and have developed a suite of plugins and ready-to-run dashboards to help you reduce toil as well as pull all of your key analytics together within a single pane of glass.

Zendesk is one of the most popular customer service platforms, known for its ease of use, robust ticketing system, and powerful automation capabilities. While Zendesk comes with native reporting and dashboards, they can be limited in terms of customization and data correlation across different sources. Additionally, building complex visualizations in Zendesk often requires more advanced knowledge of their reporting tools. This is where SquaredUp comes in!

Azure is the cloud service provider of choice for a variety of reasons – such as its ease of use, its wide variety of services, the strong community around it and its integration with other Microsoft services. While Azure comes with native data visualization solutions such as dashboards and workbooks, they require a significant amount of Azure knowledge to create and maintain.

Load testing is an extremely valuable practice for assessing how your application will actually perform in production. Whether you're expecting a handful of concurrent users or anticipate thousands, it's important to have an idea of the kind of loads that will be placed on your systems and be aware of where bottlenecks or saturation may occur.

Since we added the Open Access feature to Dashboard Server way back in 2014, it has been a customer favourite. Build a dashboard, grab a special URL, and share it with anyone without getting into the costs and hassle of user management - useful for embedding in other tools, show it off it on a very visible wall monitor, or send to management for a monthly report. It's versatile, simple, and most importantly, affordable.

Most of the time, the dashboards we create are querying data from SQL databases, Web APIs or large backend systems. Sometimes though, we might want to visualize an ad hoc data set – and this is where the SquaredUp CSV plugin really shines. You can create powerful dashboards just by pointing to the path of a CSV file, or even just paste your CSV data into a text box.

Azure DevOps and its extensive feature set helps teams plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster. With several integrated features such as Azure Pipelines or Azure Repos, it gives you the flexibility to use just what you need to complement your existing workflows. However, as your usage of Azure DevOps grows, you might find that monitoring and observing key CI/CD metrics across these services gets increasingly challenging.