Challenges
In enterprise environments, shared mailboxes often reside in different regions or server farms. When users experience slow access, it can be difficult to determine whether latency stems from geographic distance, cross-region dependencies, or broader service issues. Without active monitoring, there’s no reliable way to tell.
Approach - How it is done
The test first determines whether a user has access to any shared mailboxes. If shared access exists, the scan connects and measures access latency. For users without shared mailboxes, the test is skipped.
Value
By continuously measuring access performance, administrators gain actionable insight into regional or cross-farm latency issues. This helps distinguish between normal geographic delay and emerging performance degradation, improving both troubleshooting speed and user experience.
Challenges
Outlook clients connect to the Microsoft cloud to retrieve configurations. To do so, a DNS lookup is initiated that, in a properly configured environment, should return the optimal path to M365's Autodiscover endpoint. However, enterprises can often have intermediate redirections which result in variances in behavior on internal networks compared to external access.
Approach - How it is done
TrueDEM tests if DNS lookups performed by the Outlook client return a domain name that is correctly directed to Microsoft 365's listed service.
Value
AutoDiscover name resolution delays and name resolution loops can cause considerable confusion for internal IT teams. Outlook desktop and mobile clients do not call out DNS resolution issues as the clients will eventually try M365 servers. This can result in clients that take many minutes to open a mailbox, look up other users, even send email with no clarity on why it is so slow.
Problem
Email is a crucial part of how we communicate today, yet Exchange Online customers have no definitive way to confirm whether mail is being delivered normally. As a result, administrators are often blind to subtle delays that can signal emerging service issues.During an M365 outage, mail flow can became irregular several hours before users are losing mailbox access. Detecting those early irregularities is the aim of this test.
Approach - How it is done
This method combines prediction with seasonal outlier detection using each mailbox's inbound mail stream.
Value
This monitoring provides early visibility into potential mail flow problems—often before users notice a slowdown—giving IT teams time to act and communicate proactively.