Office 365 Network Performance tool POC release

[PaulAndrew]

[Edit: A new version of the POC was published on 6/19/2019. Announced here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Networking/Updated-Office-365-Network-Onboarding-T...]

[Edit: We updated the POC on 3/29/2019. Original post was on 1/16/2019]

With the size and scope of Office 365, a deployment can represent significant impact on an enterprise network. Connectivity issues can be complex and there are a variety of aspects to optimize including latency, local egress, WAN routing, open firewall ports, proxy bypass, bandwidth, DNS, DLP devices, cloud security brokers, etc.

Published today, a new Office 365 Network Performance POC tool is intended to help Office 365 enterprise customers with network connectivity related testing and connectivity guidance. Our goal is to provide a tool that runs sufficient networking tests that we can provide detailed guidance containing network configuration recommendations about devices between user machines and Microsoft’s network. The scope for this includes connectivity for all applications and services in Office 365 and spanning the customers LAN and WAN, proxy servers, firewalls, other perimeter network devices, ISP connectivity, cloud security brokers, and network routing up to Microsoft’s network.

Whilst we have network onboarding guidance to help with this published here, we think that by running network tests at each of your user locations we will be able to provide customized guidance that makes this work easier. It can be difficult to know what changes will make the best improvements in performance for users. Per customer guidance based on specific testing can quantify this and inform you of what connectivity elements are working well, and what still needs work for optimal performance. This should help customers doing network onboarding to have confidence in choices about networking improvements.

We’re starting small and have released a proof of concept tool to begin this project. It runs only a subset of the tests we are planning. It focuses on the network distance between user locations and Office 365 service front door servers. It identifies the following locations:

• Your location either from your web browser, or that you type in
• Your network egress location
• The Office 365 service front door server location you are using
• The optimal Office 365 service front door location for users in your city or metro area

From these locations we can provide advice if the optimal Office 365 service front door location is significantly distant to the one you are using now. We also provide a comparison of your Office 365 performance to other users in your city of metro area.

Whilst this work is focused at network onboarding for Office 365, it can also help with troubleshooting and optimization. If you want to improve the performance that your Office 365 users are seeing there may be optimizations you can make in your network connectivity. Also, some Office 365 customers don’t focus on network connectivity with they first start using Office 365. If you’re working with a customer that has performance issues or features in Office 365 that aren’t working, it could be that they haven’t completed network connectivity onboarding.

Please try it out and share your feedback as a reply below. We’re looking for feedback and we will be adding tests and guidance to this tool over the coming months.

http://aka.ms/netonboard

[#2]

hopefully you get listed on https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ and avoid the tombstones of previous tools that have gone before you

[#3]

I can see we are connected to Western Europe, which is geographically closer to us in Denmark, but it suggests this is extremely poor and we could get a significant performance boost swapping to northern europe (Finland), which is further away. Is there any way for me to test what my latency would be to this service front door in northern europe?

[#4]

@Melmix This doesn't sound right. Can you run the tests a couple more times and see if your latency at the top gets lower? I've been seeing this "warm up" issue with a few people. Thanks for trying out the tool!

[#5]

I tried it multiple times now and each time the latency went lower... started at around 150ms and ended up around 25-35ms. It now says we have a good and sometimes excellent connection. However it still keeps saying that the datacenter in Finland would be better?

[#6]

Hi @Melmix, thanks again for the testing. We've found and corrected a latency test error and you should see more consistent lower latencies now. Please take another look at http://aka.ms/netonboard.

Paul

[#7]

Would it be possible to provide a list of the organizational egress / front door ingress IPs used in the testing results so we can compare notes with traceroutes?  Getting some odd results on where the tool thinks our egress point is and where it is actually located.

[#8]

Hi @David Phillips, we're looking at how we can add these details. In the mean time you should see the same information if you do a web search on whatsmyip.

[#9]

Just to let you know Symantec catagorise this site as Suspicious 😞 https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/#/lookup-result/o365networkonboarding.azurewebsites.net

[#10]

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@Deleted wrote:
Just to let you know Symantec catagorise this site as Suspicious 😞 https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/#/lookup-result/o365networkonboarding.azurewebsites.net

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They seem to have updated their report. It's no longer suspicious

[#11]

Great!

[#12]

Nice. Would be good to have some data on the connection too and know what is it measuring to assess the connection quality. We need more visibility especially when diagnosing performance and connection quality related issues.

[#13]

@PaulAndrew 

I took a look at the tool and it does not make a lot of sense to me.

My location is Zurich, Switzerland. In Chrome, i get a recommendation for a Service Front Door in Marseille, France (800 km), in Edge, for Paris, France.

Our WAN egress is in Bern, Switzerland.

However, we are supposed to have an entry to the Microsoft Global Network around 100 km from Bern, Switzerland and just about to order a direct pairing with this "Service Front Door" (?):

Thanks,
Franck

[#14]

@PaulAndrew  Thanks for this update. This tool is much required and awaited as many organizations who want to adopt O-365 for hosting their intranets and extranets are currently running separate project(s) with unnecessary financial overheads, for N/W performance insights aiding in O-365 readiness. Keep us posted on a stable release..

[#15]

@Franck Marteaux Our datacenters in Switzerland do not yet have Exchange Online service front doors active in them, hence they don't show up in our data.

Regards,

Paul

[#16]

@AbhijithShastry We're working to get a small update published in the next few days.

Paul

[#17]

@PaulAndrew , hmm, thanks Paul, i thought a "front door" is the entry into the Microsoft Global Network and not in a specific datacenter. We do not plan to use the Switzerland based datacenter for Office 365 / ExO. However it was our understanding to chose the closest entry point into the MGN to connect into the MGN.

Is this a wrong interpretation?

Thanks,
Franck

[#18]

@Franck Marteaux we use the term Office 365 service front door to refer to the first Microsoft server that your connection reaches at an application layer so that the TCP connection is terminated. For Exchange Online these are client access front end servers and they do not store your maibox data at rest. This is also different to a router on Microsofts ASN 8075 network.

Paul

[#19]

For anyone following this post, we updated the POC release today. Please take a look. http://aka.ms/netonboard

[#20]

@PaulAndrew  I'm trying to use the POC release but i encouter an error on test 487 of 488. Used the tool on 2 different Windows 10 pc's and a collega at another site. But all the test fail at step 487. Any ideas?