Use the Graph SDK to Access Microsoft 365 Service Health Information

The Microsoft Graph includes the Service Communications API. SDK cmdlets can use the API to retrieve and work with service health data. In this article, we show how to use Graph SDK cmdlets (based on the API) to fetch and work with service health data, including creating an email report to update people about the current state of tenant health.

How Microsoft 365 Notifications Show Active User Data for Workloads Affected by Service Updates

Message center notifications for service changes posted to the Microsoft 365 admin center will include monthly active user counts for affected workloads. That sounds good, until you realize some of the downloads incurred by depending on the Microsoft Graph Reports API as the source of user data. Still, it’s better than nothing and a welcome advance.

Microsoft Introduces Data Privacy Tag for Message Center Notifications

The message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center will soon use a new data privacy tag to highlight specific service updates to tenant administrators. No messages with the new tag have yet appeared, so it’s hard to know how Microsoft plans to use the new tag or what kind of attachments it will make available to administrators to help understand the sensitive data involved in data privacy. While we’re waiting, we took at look at the tags in use today and wrote some PowerShell to report which tag is most popular.

How to Retrieve Information About Microsoft 365 Service Incidents

All services suffer outages or incidents. The Service Communications API allow Office 365 tenants to retrieve information about incidents programmatically and report details in whatever way they want. In this post, we show how to use PowerShell to fetch service messages with the API and filter for recent incidents. After that, it’s just a matter of presenting the details.

How Outlook’s Notification Pane Displays Details of Office 365 Incidents

Outlook for Windows boasts a new admin notification panel where incidents affecting the Office 365 tenant show up. It’s an interesting idea, but you wonder if there aren’t more important things for the developers to work on, especially as many other ways exist for administrators to find out when problems happen.