How To Monitor Multiple Mailboxes and Sites with Office365Mon
As we’ve had more and more interest from customers wanting to monitor multiple mailboxes and sites with Office365Mon, I decided it was time to both make it easier to do and to explain some of the facts you need to keep in mind when monitoring multiple resources.
If you look at our pricing page you’ll see that with the Basic monitoring package you can monitor up to 10 sites and mailboxes. When you go into Configure your Office365Mon subscription though, you only see a place to add one mailbox and one site. That’s because we purposefully created Office365Mon to support one mailbox and one site per subscription. The reason for that is simple – based on our many years of working with Office 365, we found that in most cases, when you have a problem with one resource, you have a problem with them all. For example, it’s very rare that you have one SharePoint site down and the rest of the sites in the tenant up and working. Generally then, if you monitor a single mailbox or site in your tenant you’ll have a pretty good idea that if it’s down, so are your other resources and vice versa.
There are exceptions to that of course, and other reasons why you may want to monitor multiple resources – that’s why we give you up to 10 with Basic monitoring. In order to do that then, you just need to create multiple subscriptions. Each subscription monitors a different site and mailbox, so if you create 10 subscriptions that’s how you can monitor 10 mailboxes and sites. We’ve made the process of creating new subscriptions much easier so I wanted to cover that first.
Creating a New Subscription
If you go to the Configure Office365Mon page, you will see a button in the General Subscription Info section called Copy Subscription.
If you click that button, it creates a new subscription for you. When it does so it creates it with this configuration:
- The Company Name is the same as the current subscription but has the date and time appended to it
- The Contact Email is the same
- All of the subscription admins are the same
- All of the notification addresses (email addresses and text phone numbers) are the same
- The outage duration to wait before sending notifications is the same (as shown in the picture below)
Here’s an example of a what the General Subscription Info looks like for a subscription that was copied:
After you copy your subscription, you will see a dropdown list of subscriptions near the top of the page:
It contains a list of all of your subscriptions so you can easily switch between the different subscriptions, whether you are configuring them, looking at reports, features, the My Info page, etc.
Adding More Mailboxes and Sites
From what I described at the beginning of this post, you know that you can now just navigate to each subscription and configure a mailbox and site for each one, and that’s how you’ll set up monitoring for multiple resources. You may notice then from the previous section, the only thing we don’t copy for you when duplicating a subscription are the resources being monitored. There’s also a simple reason for that – when you configure a resource for Office365Mon to monitor, you have to do so by logging in to the Office365Mon site with an account that has rights to that resource. For example, if you are adding a mailbox to monitor, you need to log in as an account that has rights to read the contents of the mailbox. If you are adding a site to monitor, you have to log in as an account that has at least Read rights to the site. So, if you want monitor 10 mailboxes and 10 sites for example, that means you have a few options:
- You can create one account and grant it rights to read every mailbox and every site you want to monitor.
- You can create a different account (or use existing ones) for each mailbox you want to monitor. You can grant each account rights to a site that each one can monitor.
- Some combination of 1 and 2 – for example, use different accounts for each mailbox, but just use one account and grant it Read rights to different sites for monitoring SharePoint.
Account management is another reason that we start out with one subscription, site and mailbox. Most organizations do not want to create one account that has rights to multiple mailboxes. At Office365Mon we provide you the flexibility to go forward with whatever security model works best for you.
Once you’ve settled on your security model you need to add the account(s) as an Office365Mon admin to each subscription that they are configuring. For example, assume you create an account for monitoring called “mon1”, you create a mailbox for it and you grant it rights to a SharePoint site. Please note that “mon1” will also need an Office 365 license in order to get the mailbox and have rights to the site! After you’ve completed that configuration in Office 365, you need to log into Office365Mon using an account that is already a subscription admin. Then go to the Subscription Admins section for the subscription and add the “mon1” account, like this:
After you’ve done that you need to close the browser, then open a new browser window and log into the Configure Office365Mon page using the account you just added as an admin. Once you do that you can scroll down to the Cloud Resources section and add the mailbox UPN and SharePoint site Url to monitor as you would normally. Just repeat that process for each mailbox and site you want to monitor.
Hopefully the process makes sense now. As always though, if you have questions or just feedback or feature request for the product, please email us at support@office365mon.com.
From sunny Phoenix,
Steve