One of the most compelling challenges for Office 365 is centralised monitoring. Those working in the SharePoint arena will know only too well importance of monitoring and reporting across the platforms they manage. This is not simply from a technical but also from proof of service; the availability and evolution of those services.

Proof that, the team responsible for monitoring internal SharePoint resources and servers also have a level in comfort in providing likewise monitoring for Office 365. Evolution to be able to identify over time changes in the services provided so that there are no surprises to stakeholders (both technical and business). Particularly for those organisations using centralised monitoring tools such as System Centre Operations Manager for monitoring infrastructure, the issue would be how to include service provision monitoring which exists outside of the on-premise infrastructure, so that it is possible to centralise alerting, notification, messages from those external service into on-premise environment monitoring.

I published an article for Microsoft on MSDN blogs on how to start use the Office 365 Management Pack for System Centre 2012 R2. This article will describe how to download the Office 365 Management Pack, import and then use the services and features in that Management Pack.

Go here to check out the article, and there will be follow ups on how to develop using the pack, challenges and solutions in the Service Delivery area for Office 365 and SharePoint.