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.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one of the most insidious types of digital attacks that can cause cloud outages. It is typically directed at a specific target, and if done competently, can bring an application or even all network traffic to its knees.

Microsoft is making it both convenient and cost-effective to use the SaaS cloud-based Office 365 and Azure cloud services rather than a locally hosted Office, SharePoint and their respective on-premises services. However, there can be outages due to a variety of reasons. Network issues, both local and Internet-based, data center problems, malicious activity, and environmental conditions can all cause outages.

To many IT software teams, the mantra currently in vogue for team practice is “shift-left.” That refers to moving certain activities, such as code integration, build, and testing, earlier in the software development and delivery process. By shifting them to the left, the team knows more about code quality and performance earlier, allowing for corrective action and making them nimbler in response.

This is the third part of a series on the CloudReady dashboards and visualizations. The first part covered basics like Overviews, Refresh, and Layout settings. The second part covered more advanced dashboard usage like layout pinning, capture and embedding. In this third part we’ll cover key widgets, their usage and settings.

Exoprise recently added support for OAuth (OAuth 2.0 to be exact) credentials to the core Exchange Online testing sensor. This capability has been requested in the past and with this new release, enables end-to-end testing of Exchange Online and the OAuth capabilities of Azure AD with Office 365 from multiple concurrent locations.

This is the second part of a series on the CloudReady dashboards and visualizations. The first part covered basics like Overviews, Refresh, and Layout settings. In this second part, we’ll cover more advanced creation and usage of dashboards. In part 3 and 4 we’ll cover actual widgets and how they can be used.

The Exoprise team is having a great show at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando. We’ve launched a new product and a number of new features that we’re demonstrating, catching up with customers and prospects and meeting new ones. Here’s a recap of what we’ve announced and some key announcements from Microsoft.

Exoprise has long dedicated itself to excellence when it comes to synthetic (active) monitoring for cloud services like Office 365. But sometimes customers want to monitor an application that we might not support, a custom in-house application, or they want to get the perspective of an end-user that is on the road or telecommuting. That’s where our new Service Watch can come in handy.