Email alerts for Microsoft 365 Service Health incidents is now Generally Available! (as fellow MVP Greig Sheridan pointed out, although it’s GA, it’s gradually rolling out from December 2019 to March 2020 – but I already have this in my live tenant) In case you missed this one, there’s now an easy way to configure email alerts to go out when there’s an outage of some sort in the Microsoft 365 space.

Personally I’m used to checking out the portal once I hear about a complaint and seeing what might be broken. Instead, I’ll now see emails to keep across what’s going on in the Microsoft world, as well as have a ticket raised via email to helpdesk, so any potential user affecting outages are identified earlier in the troubleshooting process.

The advisory is MC196504 for those who want to read about it in the ‘Microsoft 365 admin center Message center’, but all you need to do to enable it is:

From the new Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Health > Service Health. Under the All services tab, click the Preferences button:

This will pop out a side window:

From this page, you can enter up to 2 email addresses – so if you want it to go to more than 2 recipients, use a distribution group. You can choose the services you want to receive alerts about (all are ticked by default), and as it will advise when saving, it may take up to 8 hours to apply.

This one’s a pretty simple feature, but one I’m very glad to see. Set it up for yourself today!