Save time and effort with Microsoft 365 self-help diagnostics

The Microsoft 365 Commercial Support team resolves customer support cases and provides support to help you be successful and realize the full potential and value of your purchase. Our support services extend across the entire lifecycle and include pre-sales, onboarding and deployment, usage and management, accounts and billing, and break-fix support. We also spend a considerable amount of time working to improve the supportability of Microsoft 365 services to reduce the number of issues you experience as well as minimize the effort and time it takes to resolve your issues if they do occur.

Today, we’re excited to share more about some of our supportability work with Microsoft 365 self-help diagnostics.

As an IT administrator, you know that troubleshooting issues with Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft Viva, and OneDrive for Business can be time-consuming and require effort from both you and your users. Fortunately, Microsoft 365 includes more than 50 self-help diagnostics that can help you identify and resolve common issues quickly and easily without opening a support case. Taking advantage of these built-in diagnostics can help you save time and reduce IT support costs as well as help keep your users satisfied and able to stay productive.

In this article, we’ll explore the capabilities and benefits of Microsoft 365 self-help diagnostics and how they can make your job easier. We’ll also touch on the platform and the work happening behind the scenes with our diagnostic development team to bring this all to life.

Self-help diagnostics overview

Microsoft 365 self-help diagnostics are a set of tools available from within the Microsoft 365 admin center when you’re logged in as an administrator.

From the navigation pane, select Show All > Support > New service request, and then briefly describe the issue.

Using Machine Learning (ML) powered search functionality, the Microsoft 365 admin center then determines whether there is a diagnostic that could potentially help solve your issue.

For the past 5+ years, a small development team within the Microsoft 365 Commercial Support organization has been steadily building and scaling up diagnostic service platform capabilities and adding new solution assets to address more scenarios and issue types. The team works in close partnership with our global support and field teams to deeply understand the technical challenges facing our customers and how they solve them, as well as with many Microsoft 365 product engineering teams on the core foundational design and product feature capabilities that can then be automated.

Our core objective has been to transfer the knowledge of our in-house product experts into an efficient, scalable, and multi-market self-help platform and set of solutions that are easy to use (i.e.: remove dependencies on PowerShell) and help administrators accelerate deployment and adoption of Microsoft 365 in their organizations by quickly unblocking setup and configuration issues. Each year, our diagnostics are run more than a million times by thousands of Microsoft 365 customers assisting them with troubleshooting their issues.

The Microsoft 365 diagnostic service is built on Azure and enables rapid development of diagnostics in a consistent and reusable format that returns results for a reliable and action-based user experience. This lets us continually innovate to make improvements and add new diagnostics on a regular basis. It’s been a multi-year journey to factor in a wide range of technology, business, and customer driven considerations to build and enable the breadth of solutions available today.

Self-help diagnostics for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration tool that’s used by millions of users worldwide. When issues arise with meetings, calling, messaging, or file sharing, the self-help diagnostics for Microsoft Teams can help. For example, if a user is unable to create or join a Microsoft Teams conference call, a diagnostic can be run that performs a large range of verifications to determine if a user is able to create a PSTN conference call. For more information, check out Self-help diagnostics for Teams administrators - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn.

Self-help diagnostics for Exchange Online and Outlook

Exchange Online and Outlook are essential tools for email communication and calendaring in many organizations. Sometimes issues can occur with email delivery, synchronization, and connectivity. When that happens, administrators can use the self-help diagnostics for Exchange Online and Outlook to help troubleshoot and fix common scenarios. For example, if a user is continually prompted for a password in Outlook when connecting to Microsoft 365, a diagnostic can be run to perform automated checks and provide possible solutions to fix the problem. For more information, check out Self-help diagnostics for issues in Exchange Online and Outlook - Exchange | Microsoft Learn.

Sometimes email accounts become compromised when a bad actor steals a user’s credentials and then signs in as the user to perform illicit actions. The ability to react and recover quickly when these events happen is critical for any organization. To assist, our team developed a Compromised Account diagnostic that lets you quickly test and identify suspicious activities against an account and see details and recommended actions to help with recovery.

Enter the email address of the affected user:

An image demonstrating the Compromised Account diagnostic in the Microsoft 365 self-help diagnostics tool.

Results example: 

An image demonstrating example results after inputting an email address via the Compromised Account diagnostic in the Microsoft 365 self-help diagnostics tool.

To learn more, check out this helpful Learn article: Responding to a Compromised Email Account | Microsoft Learn

Self-help diagnostics for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business

SharePoint and OneDrive for Business are popular tools for collaboration and document management. However, sometimes issues can occur with permissions, file synchronization, or sharing. When this happens, administrators can utilize diagnostics to troubleshoot and resolve many common scenarios. For example, if a user is having trouble accessing a file, an administrator can run a diagnostic to determine if the issue is related to permissions, connectivity, or synchronization and see the steps to take to address. For more information, check out Self-help diagnostics for SharePoint Online and OneDrive administrators - SharePoint | Microsoft Learn. 

List of available diagnostics

The table below shows the full list of Microsoft 365 diagnostics that our team currently makes available for IT administrators. Check back regularly for updates and new additions.

A table outlining the Microsoft 365 diagnostics currently available for Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online & Outlook, and SharePoint & OneDrive for Business.

In closing

Continued investment in our Microsoft 365 diagnostic service platform and the expansion of new solutions to benefit customers and partners is an integral part of our Microsoft 365 supportability strategy. Today, we have more than a hundred diagnostics used internally by our support engineers and global support teams. They help test and ensure diagnostics will effectively help customers solve issues on their own before a diagnostic gets released publicly. We’re especially excited about the progress we’re making with diagnostics in new and emerging areas like Security/Digital Safety and Microsoft Viva.

Be sure to check out our previous blog posts:

1. Helping Customers Fix Their Own Issues with Microsoft Defender for Office 365
2. Helping IT admins save time and effort managing Microsoft Viva

Finally, as part of our ongoing supportability work, we’ve been honored and proud to give back to communities in need through our Microsoft 365 Diagnostics for Social Good program.

We look forward to sharing more in the coming months!

Brian Stoner is a Director on the CSS Modern Work Supportability team where he leads a team of technical and business program managers. 

The CSS Modern Work Supportability team delivers innovative self-help solutions and diagnostics, in-service enhancements, and support programs to help customers get maximum value from their Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions and create an easy-to-use, connected support experience. 

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