15.4 Service Health in Microsoft 365 and Entra Admin Centers
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft 365 Service health (Health > Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center) is the tenant dashboard for current incidents and advisories Microsoft is working — check it before you call support.
- Message center is change management (including planned maintenance). Health > Network connectivity is the tenant’s path quality to Microsoft 365. Neither one is the live incident board.
- The Microsoft Entra admin center reports identity health under Entra ID > Monitoring & health > Health, including monthly SLA Attainment for user authentication availability.
- If Service health is green and only your sites are hurting, investigate tenant configuration and the network path; if Service health shows a Teams or Exchange incident, the problem is on Microsoft’s side of the line.
Quick Answer: Health > Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center answers “is Exchange, Teams, or another cloud service in an incident right now?” Message center answers “what is Microsoft changing?” Health > Network connectivity answers “is our path to Microsoft 365 healthy?” In the Microsoft Entra admin center, Entra ID > Monitoring & health > Health is identity health and SLA Attainment for sign-in availability. Green Service health plus a local outage usually means it is just us.
The April 30, 2025 outline asks you to determine service health status by using the Microsoft 365 admin center or the Microsoft Entra admin center. Pair this with Chapter 9: you already learned that Health splits Service health (now) from Message center (next). This section is the operational close — how an admin decides what is broken and which console proves it.
Microsoft 365 admin center: Health > Service health
Official Learn: you can view the health of Microsoft services — including Office on the web, Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, and others — on the Service health page. If users report a cloud problem, check Service health before you call support to see whether it is a known issue with a resolution in progress.
How to open it
- Sign in to admin.microsoft.com (or admin.cloud.microsoft) with an admin account. People assigned roles such as Service Support Administrator and Helpdesk Administrator can view service health; other admin roles can as well (see About admin roles).
- Go to Health > Service health, or select the Service health card on the home dashboard. The card tells you whether an active issue exists.
The Overview tab lists each cloud service, a Health icon, and any active incidents or advisories. Two groupings matter for reading the page:
- Issues for your organization to act on — problems detected in your environment that need your action. Hidden when empty.
- Active issues Microsoft is working on — incidents and advisories on Microsoft’s side.
The Issue history tab lists incidents and advisories resolved in the last 7 or 30 days. Use it when someone says “was Exchange down last Tuesday?”
If you are hurting and the page is quiet, Microsoft provides Report an issue. Microsoft compares your report with other tenants; if the issue originated in the service, they add an incident or advisory you can track. Reported issues shows what your tenant submitted. Do not invent incident IDs on the exam — the page assigns them.
Admins can Customize the service list and subscribe to email notifications (up to two addresses per admin) for incidents and/or advisories, or watch a single issue. The Microsoft 365 Admin mobile app can push the same health signals.
Clicking an issue title opens details: title, ID, last updated, estimated start, affected services, issue type (incident or advisory), issue origin (Microsoft versus your environment), status, user impact, and the update feed.
Incidents, advisories, and status words
Official definitions:
| Type | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Advisory | Microsoft knows a problem that affects some users; the service is still available. Impact is often limited or intermittent; a workaround may exist. |
| Incident | A critical issue: the service or a major function is unavailable (for example users cannot send mail or cannot sign in). Impact is noticeable. |
Status values you will see on an issue include Investigating, Service degradation, Service interruption, Restoring service, Extended recovery, Investigation suspended, Service restored, False positive, and Post-incident report published. You do not need to memorize every phrase. You need interruption / degradation = current Microsoft-side pain versus restored / history = it already ended.
Planned maintenance is not on Service health. Official tip: track planned maintenance in Message center and filter to Plan for change. Service descriptions say customers are notified no later than five days before planned maintenance through Message center. Unplanned downtime is what Service health is for.
If you cannot sign in to the admin center, use status.cloud.microsoft and the Microsoft 365 status account on X as a public fallback. Those public channels are coarse. After you can authenticate, the tenant Service health page is the system of record for your subscriptions.
Do not confuse three Health neighbors
| Surface | Question it answers | Typical exam stem |
|---|---|---|
| Health > Service health | Is Microsoft’s service in an incident or advisory now? | “Is Teams down for everyone?” |
| Health > Message center | What is Microsoft changing, retiring, or maintaining? | “A feature changes in 40 days.” |
| Health > Network connectivity (and the connectivity test) | Is our path to Microsoft 365 healthy (locations, insights, perimeter)? | “Only the London office is slow; Service health is green.” |
| Reports > Usage | Who used email or Teams last week? | Adoption / shelfware — not outages |
Network connectivity in the admin center is an adjunct to Service health. Insights come from in-product measurements for your tenant. A bad score at one office while Service health shows Teams healthy is the textbook “it is just us” (ISP, proxy, hairpin VPN, blocked endpoints). A Teams incident on Service health is the textbook “it is not just us.”
Microsoft Entra admin center: identity service health
Identity has its own console: entra.microsoft.com. Official Microsoft Entra Health documentation:
- Sign in as at least a Reports Reader.
- Browse to Entra ID > Monitoring & health > Health.
- Health Monitoring summarizes signals and alerts for identity scenarios (interactive MFA sign-ins, Conditional Access managed/compliant device requirements, SAML sign-ins, and related scenario monitoring — some of this is preview).
- SLA Attainment shows monthly user authentication availability for Microsoft Entra ID (the look-back against the Entra authentication SLA, which the Online Services SLA publishes at 99.99% for Entra ID Basic/Premium sign-in/token issuance).
Use Entra Health when the stem is sign-in tokens, MFA volume anomalies, or authentication availability. Use Microsoft 365 Service health when the stem is Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, or Office on the web. A tenant-wide sign-in outage may appear in both places because Microsoft 365 sign-in depends on Entra; start where the stem points.
Related Entra pages that are not the MS-900 “service health status” answer: Sign-in logs (who signed in), Identity Secure Score (security recommendations), and Entra Connect Health (on-premises sync / AD FS infrastructure). Connect Health matters in hybrid shops, but the fundamentals bullet is the Entra admin center Health blade plus the Microsoft 365 Service health blade.
Realistic exam-style scenarios
“Is Teams down globally?” Open Health > Service health. If Microsoft Teams shows an incident (service interruption or degradation) under Active issues Microsoft is working on, you have your answer. Share the issue ID and status with the business. Do not invent a fake ID in a case study — use the one on the page.
“Is it just us?” Service health shows Teams healthy. Only the warehouse Wi-Fi cannot join meetings. Open Health > Network connectivity and run the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test. That is a path problem, not a global Teams outage, and it is also the kind of issue the SLA usually excludes.
Planned Saturday work. Microsoft will perform maintenance that might affect a feature. That notice lives in Message center, not as a Service health incident. Service descriptions commit to at least five days’ notice for planned maintenance.
Sign-in tokens. Users cannot obtain Entra tokens for several line-of-business apps. Go to the Microsoft Entra admin center > Monitoring & health > Health and read SLA Attainment plus any health-monitoring alerts. Checking only SharePoint site usage will miss it.
Admin center will not load. Before you rebuild the tenant, try status.cloud.microsoft. Then, once you can sign in, confirm on tenant Service health.
History for a credit conversation. Issue history (7 or 30 days) plus the incident detail feed give you timestamps for the SLA claim in section 15.3. The dashboard still does not file the claim for you.
Exam traps
- Service health ≠ Message center. Now versus next.
- Service health ≠ Network connectivity. Microsoft’s service versus your path.
- Service health ≠ Usage reports. Outages versus adoption.
- Entra Health ≠ Identity Secure Score. Availability/signals versus security recommendations.
- Green Service health does not mean every client works. It means Microsoft is not posting a service incident.
- Do not invent incident IDs or unpublished worldwide Sev clocks.
- status.cloud.microsoft is the unauthenticated fallback, not the full tenant dashboard.
Official sources
- How to check Microsoft 365 service health — Health > Service health, incidents versus advisories, history, report an issue
- Service health and continuity — planned maintenance in Message center, unplanned downtime in Service health
- Message center — change communications
- Microsoft 365 network connectivity test — Health | Connectivity versus Service health
- Microsoft Entra Health monitoring — Entra admin center Health and SLA Attainment
- Study guide for Exam MS-900 — determine service health status
Users in every office cannot join Microsoft Teams meetings this morning. The admin needs to know whether Microsoft is already working a service incident. Which blade is the official first stop?
Security wants last month’s Microsoft Entra ID user-authentication availability and any identity health signals. Which admin center path matches official Learn guidance?
Service health shows Microsoft Teams as healthy, but only the London office cannot reach Teams. Which Microsoft 365 admin center area is designed to assess that office’s path to Microsoft 365?
How should an admin tell a worldwide Microsoft 365 incident from a problem that is only in their tenant or network?
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