Chapter 15: Support Offerings for Microsoft 365 Services

In this chapter, we're going to take a look at how and when to engage support for your Microsoft 365 environment. It's important to know the boundaries of a service, how to track and interrogate your environment's health, and how to get help when you need it.

There are several resources available to help you understand what is available to you. By the end of this chapter, you should be familiar with the performance and availability you can expect from Microsoft 365, as well as methods for obtaining support.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Understanding Microsoft 365 service-level agreements
• Determining the service health status
• Creating a support request
• Communicating with Microsoft with UserVoice

Let's start!

Understanding Microsoft 365 service-level agreements

Like most service offerings, Microsoft 365 has a service-level agreement (SLA) attached to it. An SLA is the service provider's commitment to providing a defined level of availability and reliability. In the case of Microsoft 365, the SLA for operation includes 99.9% availability, excluding scheduled downtimes (typically, this is for service upgrades). Microsoft provides a mechanism to recuperate a portion of your bill as service credits, should they fail to meet the SLA.

Microsoft's SLA identifies a few important notes about claims:

• Claims must be submitted to Microsoft's customer support and should include details of the service outage, such as the timeline and duration, the number of users and locations affected, and the steps you took to resolve the issue.
• Claims must be received by the end of the calendar month, following the month where the incident occurred (for example, if the incident occurred...

Determining the service health status

Microsoft provides several ways you can obtain information about the health of various Microsoft 365 services, including the following resources:

• The Service Health Dashboard
• The Service Status page
• The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter feed

The Service Health Dashboard will have the most comprehensive information regarding service health status and availability and should be the resource you use when determining whether you are experiencing a service outage. However, it doesn't provide any text messaging or other alerting capabilities. The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter feed is a good resource for getting notifications.

We will learn more about these tools and methods next.

The Service Health Dashboard

As stated in the previous section, the Service Health Dashboard should be your first step when determining whether your environment is experiencing issues. The Service Health Dashboard contains the current health status...

Creating a support request

Support requests for Microsoft 365 issues are typically raised through the Microsoft 365 admin center. You can create a support request by performing the following steps:

1. Log into the Microsoft 365 admin center (https://admin.microsoft.com) and navigate to Support | New service request:

   Figure 15.6 – Creating a service request in the Microsoft 365 admin center

2. In the panel that opens, you can type in your questions. If applicable, a list of suggested solutions will be displayed. If no suitable options are displayed, you can select Contact Support:

   Figure 15.7 – Microsoft 365 service ticket suggestions

3. On the Contact support view, you can fill out any required information, select the preferred option to be contacted, and, once ready, click Contact me:

Figure 15.8 – Contacting support

Once a support request has been created, you can select the Support | View service requests option in the Microsoft...

Communicating with Microsoft through UserVoice

When it comes to ideas and opportunities for improvement across the services being used, it is common that organizations might have feedback to share, based on their usage experience. In many cases, the best tool where these new ideas can be submitted is UserVoice. Users can review and search from ideas submitted by others, as well as submitting their own ideas, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 15.10 – UserVoice

Microsoft engineering reviews ideas submitted for inclusion in the product roadmap.

UserVoice Update

In March 2021, Microsoft confirmed that they are migrating away from UserVoice as a feedback collection mechanism. This is happening on a per-product basis. Announcements will be posted in each product's UserVoice forum as the migration approaches. Questions mentioning UserVoice may still occur on the exam due to the overlap of when the exam content was refreshed and the announcement...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the Microsoft 365 SLAs, including what it guarantees and what limitations have been put around them. Additionally, you learned how to monitor the various channels that Microsoft maintains for communicating service health: the Service Health Dashboard, the Service Status page, and the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter feed. Finally, you learned about opening and managing support requests from the Microsoft 365 admin center.

It is important to understand the support levels for release categories and the incident response matrix, both for the exam and day-to-day operational requests.

In the next chapter, we'll cover the Microsoft 365 service's life cycle.

Questions

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter. You can find the answers in Chapter 18, Assessments:

1. Which of these is not a way to view service status updates for Microsoft 365?
   1. Twitter
   2. Service Health Dashboard
   3. Security & Compliance Center
   4. Service Status page
2. The general SLA for Microsoft 365 availability is expressed as which of the following?
   1. 99%
   2. 99.9%
   3. 99.99%
   4. 99.999%
3. When opening a service ticket, which severity level is used to indicate a significant loss or degradation of services that requires immediate attention?
   1. Severity A
   2. Severity B
   3. Severity C
   4. Severity 1
   5. Severity 2
   6. Severity 3
4. Which severity level indicates business hours-only support?
   1. Severity A
   2. Severity B
   3. Severity C
   4. Severity D
5. What is the name of the paid support service that Microsoft provides?
   1. Priority Support
   2. Priority Access
   3. Prestige
   4. Premier