Top 7 Office 365 Troubleshooting Tools

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As an Office 365 Partner and implementing project, it’s nice to have a collection of tools to turn to when troubleshooting issues with Office 365. Below I’ve shared a few of my favorites by Microsoft.

 

1. Office 365 Outlook Connectivity Guided Walkthrough

One of the most common problems is troubleshooting Outlook connectivity to Exchange Online. This guided walkthrough is intended for Office 365 Administrators to help diagnose Outlook connectivity issues for their users.

http://aka.ms/outlookconnectivity

2. Office 365 Speed Test

If you have been on Microsoft Online Services for some time, you might have previously used the site speedtest.microsoftonline.com which tested the connection speed and reliability of the connection to the Microsoft Datacenters. While that site has been decommissioned, you can use the links below to test the speed between your location and the datacenters in your region.

• Amsterdam, NL: http://trippams.online.lync.com
• Blue Ridge, VA: http://trippbl2.online.lync.com
• Dublin, IE: http://trippdb3.online.lync.com
• Hong Kong: http://tripphkn.online.lync.com
• San Antonio, TX: http://trippsn2.online.lync.com
• Singapore: http://trippsg1.online.lync.com

3. Remote Connectivity Analyzer — now With Message Analyzer

If you don’t already know about the Remote Connectivity Analyzer, it’s a great tool for troubleshooting many common Exchange issues.

http://Aka.ms/rca

One of the coolest new features is the Message Header Analyzer. As an administrator you’ve probably had more than one of your users ask why a message took so long to get delivered. To give them an answer you usually had to look at the message headers which is time consuming. Well now you can simply paste the header into the Message Analyzer and it will tell you where the delay came from.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/05/01/introducing-message-analyzer-an-smtp-header-analysis-tool-in-microsoft-remote-connectivity-analzyer.aspx

4. Mail Protection Reports for Office 365

With the new release of Office 365 you can now pull mailflow data down to Excel for analysis. It does require Excel 2013 to function.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30716

5. Hybrid Free/Busy Troubleshooter

This guided-walk-through describes how to troubleshoot free/busy issues that may occur in a hybrid deployment of an on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Exchange Online in Office 365.

http://aka.ms/hybridfreebusy

6. Scan for Problems in Microsoft Outlook

This is yet another troubleshooting tool for Microsoft Outlook. It has to be run on the machine experiencing the issue, but it can be helpful at resolving persistent Outlook problems.

Here’s an article that talks more about it: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh875170.aspx

Here’s a link to download it: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28806

7. MOSDAL (Microsoft Online Services Diagnostics and Logging) Support Toolkit

No collection of tools would be complete without the MOSDAL. If you’ve ever opened a case with Microsoft support you’ve probably already run the MOSDAL tool.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=626

One could argue that it gathers too much information, but it still can be helpful for difficult issues.