Change Management is an important part of managing the improvements we make to our service that may sometimes disrupt our customers. The key is empowering customers to identify if they have messages that will be affected when we announce changes to the service. To that end, we’d like to announce the Public Preview for the Change Optics Report. It will be the central location for finding messages that could be affected by future changes to the service.
As we improve or identify issues in Exchange Online, there is now a report to point customers to when we announce changes that could affect the sending and delivery of certain messages. This report will showcase multiple scenarios of interest and importance to admins preparing for change. It displays a sample set of messages that have the characteristics that match those expected to be affected.
These example messages give admins the information necessary to launch investigations that highlight where actions are needed to avoid disruption to their organizations as changes arrive. The report can then be used to observe the progress made to reduce those messages to a point where the risk has been removed ahead of the related change.
Initial Scenarios
The report is being released with two scenarios already included.
- OMC represents Onmicrosoft.com traffic being sent externally. This is aimed at customers from large organizations still seeing usage they need to address before the traffic is throttled. For more information, see Limiting Onmicrosoft Domain Usage for Sending Emails | Microsoft Community Hub.
- DRS represents Direct Send traffic being received by an organization’s tenant. This is useful for customers looking to use the Reject Direct Send setting and needing to first ensure all legitimate traffic is identified and catered for. For more information, see Introducing more control over Direct Send in Exchange Online | Microsoft Community Hub.
Using the report
The report can be found in the Exchange Admin Center (https://admin.cloud.microsoft/exchange) under Reports > Mail flow > Change Optics Report
Change Optics Report: Use this report to view changes made to your Exchange Online configuration over time. You can filter by date range and change type to find specific changes.
The report is divided into a Summary page and Details page.
Summary Page
This provides a summary chart tracking the volume of messages flag by the various scenarios being tracked.
Details Page
The Details page allows you to see example messages per scenario. The main message properties are available for use in an investigation, and the table can be exported. Message Trace can be used to retrieve any additional information needed about a message.
The scenario you are interested in can be selected from the dropdown menu.
Please provide any feedback in the Comments section. We will update this blog to announce when the report reaches GA.
Microsoft 365 Messaging Team
