Office 365 Service Health Dashboard now available for all admins

Managing your network with Office 365 Administration just got a bit easier. After months going through several stages of preview, the new Service health dashboard has entered general availability. If you haven’t been following the changes being made to the service through its preview program, here are the major improvements.

Access rich and more actionable incident insights—The dashboard now features a view that separates major business critical outages from others and splits them into two categories: Incidents and Advisories. This view makes it easy for you to identify issues that you might want to act on immediately.

Quickly understand the incident—A summary view surfaces the most relevant and critical details to you in two short sentences—easy and quick to consume. If you want to access additional details, you can go to a more detailed view that provides you with all available information, including workarounds and message history. You can also access a history of incidents and advisories that occurred in the past 30 days.

Easily see the impact for your organization—The dashboard allows you to quickly understand the impact of the service incident on your organization by showing you the number of impacted users. (Please note: This functionality is currently available for Exchange Online–related incidents only and will be extended to other workloads over time.)

Quickly provide feedback—A rating option now enables admins to provide feedback on the accuracy and usefulness of the information of each post on the Service health dashboard.

As is often the case with Microsoft services, this launch only constitutes a starting point for the Service health dashboard. The blog post accompanying the launch also mentioned that there are many additional features they plan to launch in the coming months. Here’s a bit of what they have in mind:

• Tell us about issues
• Stay informed through your preferred channel
• Access user level details
• Check the health of your users
• In-product messaging

This update has just begun rolling out to all Office 365 Administration users. If you don’t yet have access to it, you may have to give it a bit of time – these roll-outs tend to happen by region, and can drop at different times for different people.