Microsoft 365 Service Health and Message Trace, Now in Chat

June 4, 2026 · InfraScout Team

Two questions come up constantly mid-assessment, and until now both meant leaving the conversation. The first: "is any Microsoft 365 service degraded right now, and is anything changing soon?" The second, during a mail-flow investigation: "did this email actually get delivered, and if not, where did it stall?" With this update, InfraScout answers both directly. A new Service Health toolset surfaces tenant-wide status, active incidents, and message-center announcements, and a new Exchange Online message-trace toolset follows a message through mail-flow over the last 90 days — both read-only, both available in the same assessment conversation.

Microsoft 365 Service Health

When you are reviewing a tenant and something looks off, the first thing worth ruling out is Microsoft's own service status. InfraScout now reads the health surface that the Microsoft 365 admin center groups under Health, so you can ask mid-assessment whether a workload is degraded before you spend time hunting for a configuration problem that isn't there.

The toolset covers three things you can list or drill into. You can pull a health overview across services to see at a glance which workloads are healthy and which are reporting trouble, then open a specific service for its current state. You can list active incidents and issues — newest first — and open any one of them for the full advisory. And you can browse message-center announcements, so a question like "what changes are coming that affect this tenant?" gets a concrete answer pulled straight from Microsoft's own change communications.

This is read-only and agentless: there is no agent to install and nothing on the tenant changes. It pairs naturally with the rest of an assessment. If a playbook step turns up an unexpected result, you can pivot into a health check, confirm whether Microsoft is reporting a degradation, and either note it as the cause or rule it out and keep going — all without leaving the run.

To keep things readable, lists come back newest-first, and when a service or message ID can't be found, InfraScout returns a clear, friendly explanation rather than a raw error.

Exchange Online Message Trace

Mail-flow investigations are some of the most time-sensitive an admin runs: a user reports a message that never arrived, and you need to know whether it was delivered, failed, queued, or quarantined — and where in the path it stopped. InfraScout now traces Exchange Online mail-flow directly from the assessment conversation.

You can list message traces across the last 90 days, filtered by sender, recipient, or delivery status — delivered, failed, pending, or quarantined. Each query spans up to a ten-day window, so a broad investigation is a sequence of focused lookups rather than one unbounded scan; with no filter, InfraScout returns the last 48 hours. Once you've found the message in question, you can open its per-recipient delivery detail to see the processing events for each recipient — exactly where the message moved through mail-flow and where, if anywhere, it stalled.

That turns "did this email get delivered?" into something you can answer in the same chat where you're running the rest of the review. Both tools are read-only: they trace and report on mail-flow, but they cannot change message routing, release a quarantined item, or alter anything in the tenant.

One-time admin steps

These toolsets read from your tenant, so an administrator grants the matching application permissions to the Entra app registration InfraScout uses. Service Health needs ServiceHealth.Read.All for status and incidents, and ServiceMessage.Read.All for message-center announcements. Message Trace needs ExchangeMessageTrace.Read.All.

Message Trace has one extra prerequisite. The tracing API requires a specific first-party service principal to exist in the tenant; if it is missing, the API rejects calls even after the permission is consented. The InfraScout customer-app onboarding script now requests the message-trace permission and provisions that service principal for you, so a fresh onboarding run leaves everything in place. If you onboarded before this release, re-run the script to add the permission and provision the service principal.

Once consent is in place, the new tools are available to every assessment in the tenant.

Try it

Open an assessment and ask a health question — "is Exchange Online healthy right now?" or "what's in message center for this tenant?" Then, in a mail-flow investigation, ask InfraScout to trace a message — "did the invoice email to this user get delivered, and where did it stall?" InfraScout picks the right tool, reads from your tenant, and returns results you can act on.

Questions or feedback? Reach us at info@infrascout.cloud.