What are my options for reporting and monitoring in Office 365?

Office 365 is a great product that continues to improve, but when it comes to monitoring or reporting what is happening on the tenant today we feel it comes up short.  We have reviewed a few products that can help improve this experience:

Exoprise:
Exoprise will monitor your Office 365 tenant with a client that is installed on a local PC and then compare this data to results gathered by other clients around the world.  The crowdsourcing of the performance data allows the tool to narrow down if an issue is being caused by an Exchange Online server malfunctioning or if it is a potential local network issue between your client and the online tenant.

Pros:

• Day to day report of how healthy your tenant is compared to others that are available
• Ability to see how others are doing the same day helps to identity where problems are
• Gives the ability to show where your data is headed on a geographical map
• You can add multiple sensors/clients that will give you a more rounded view if you have multiple sites.

Cons:

• If the PC with the sensor is off, no data can be gathered.
• Limited number of reporting features

Cogmotive:

Cogmotive is a web based report driven tool for your Office 365 tenant. It gives detailed reports of statistical data on Exchange, Lync, mobile usage, licensing, and security.

Pros:

• Great interface and easy to setup
• Excellent graph outputs to quickly digest data
• Detailed mailbox usage information
• Mobile device reporting by device
• Easy view of who has permissions to which mailboxes

Cons:

• Limited custom reporting

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.