Use the Graph SDK to Access Microsoft 365 Service Health Information

Graph-based Service Communications API is now the Route to Service Health Data

In January 2021, I wrote about how to use the Office 365 Service Communications API to programmatically retrieve the service health information that’s available in the Microsoft 365 admin center (Figure 1).

At the time, the API used the manage.office.com endpoint. In December 2021, Microsoft deprecated the manage.office.com endpoint and introduced the Service Communications Graph API as the replacement. In this article, I explain how to use the API with Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets to retrieve service health information.

Retrieving Service Health Data

As shown in Figure 1, the active items Microsoft is working on are those that impact the service in some way, usually by removing the ability of users to do something. To find these items, run the Get-MgServiceAnnouncementIssue cmdlet and filter for items classified as advisory with a status of ‘serviceDegration’:

[array]$ServiceHealthItems = Get-MgServiceAnnouncementIssue -All `
    -Filter "classification eq 'Advisory' and status eq 'serviceDegradation'" | `
    Sort-Object {$_.LastModifiedDateTime -as [datetime]} -Descending

$ServiceHealthItems | Format-Table Id, Title, FeatureGroup, LastModifiedDateTime

If you don’t filter the service health items, the Get-MgServiceAnnouncementIssue cmdlet, including those where Microsoft resolved the issue (as with many SDK cmdlets, the All switch tells the cmdlet to fetch everything). This data reveals the areas where most issues occur. In my tenant, the 346 available issues broke down as follows:

$Data = Get-MgServiceAnnouncementIssue -All
$Data | Group-Object FeatureGroup -Noelement | Sort-Object Count -Descending | Format-Table Name, Count -AutoSize

Name                                    Count
----                                    -----
Teams Components                           80
Administration                             39
E-Mail and calendar access                 27
SharePoint Features                        25
Portal                                     23
Management and Provisioning                22
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint            21
Cloud App Security                         13
Viva Engage                                10

Another interesting grouping is by service:

$Data | Group-Object Service -Noelement | Sort-Object Count -Descending | Format-Table Name, Count -AutoSize

Name                                      Count
----                                      -----
Microsoft Teams                              80
Microsoft 365 suite                          64
Exchange Online                              60
Microsoft Defender XDR                       32
SharePoint Online                            30
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps            25
Microsoft Viva                               12
OneDrive for Business                         8

The start date for the oldest issue was March 1, 2023. The oldest last modified date for an issue was July 31, 2023. This suggests that Microsoft might keep about six months of service issue data online. Your mileage might vary.

Fetching Overall Service Health Data

Underneath the advisory items, the Microsoft 365 admin center displays an overview showing the health for individual services like Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, and so on. This information is accessible by running the Get-MgServiceAnnouncementHealthOverview cmdlet. In my tenant, this generates a list of 32 individual services, some of which (like Sway and Microsoft Managed Desktop), I’m not interested in. I therefore amend the output by filtering the services that I consider most important:

[array]$ImportantServices = "Exchange", "Teams", "SharePoint", "OrgLiveID", "Planner", "microsoftteams", "O365Client", "OneDriveForBusiness"
[array]$ImportantServiceStatus = Get-MgServiceAnnouncementHealthOverview | Where-Object {$_.Id -in $ImportantServices}
$ImportantServiceStatus | Sort-Object Service | Format-Table Service, Status -AutoSize

Service            Status
-------            ------
Exchange Online    serviceDegradation
Microsoft 365 apps serviceOperational
Microsoft Entra    serviceOperational
Microsoft Teams    serviceDegradation
Planner            serviceOperational
SharePoint Online  serviceDegradation

Using Service Health Data to Highlight Current Advisories

Many people will be perfectly happy to access service health information via the Microsoft 365 admin center. The advantage of using an API to retrieve the same information is that you can then use it in whatever way you think appropriate. As a working example to demonstrate what’s possible, I wrote a script that can run interactively or as an Azure Automation runbook using a managed identity.

The script retrieves the open service health advisories and creates an email with an HTML-format report containing the service data that is sent to nominated recipients (any mixture of mail-enabled objects, including individual mailboxes, distribution lists, and Microsoft 365 groups). The idea is to keep the recipients updated about progress with open issues that Microsoft is working on. Figure 2 shows an example email generated using the service advisories published in my tenant.

After it’s extracted, the report can be disseminated in other ways. For instance, you could publish it as a Teams channel message.

You can download the script from GitHub.

Disrupted Change

Changing the details of an API is always disruptive. It’s not just the new endpoint. It’s also the way that the API returns data. Everything must be checked and verified. At least now the Service Communications API is part of the Microsoft Graph. As such, the level of change should be minimal in the future and we have the added benefit of PowerShell cmdlets to work with.

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