Number of affected tenants info is now shown for SHD events

I’ve been criticizing the wording and level of detail given in messages on the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard for as long as I can remember, but this time I have few good words to share. Either by mistake or deliberately, the SHD events exposed via the Office 365 Service Communications API are now showing the number of affected tenants, which gives us an interesting insight.

Here’s how it will look like:

PS C:\Users\Vasil> $events.Events | select Id,AffectedTenantCount | sort Id

Id AffectedTenantCount
-- -------------------
EX75672 6983060
EX77020 2303164
EX77366 6983146
EX77472 6995812
LY75883 3002702

Now, if we are to compare with the detail given in the portal, we will get the exact same info, sans the number of affected tenants:

Whether Microsoft decides to keep this additional level of detail is unknown, but it’s certainly a welcome change.

In case you are not familiar with the API, you can refer to this blog post for some additional information and example on how to get the data via PowerShell. Here’s the sample code I used, based on the info provided in the article:

$cred = Get-Credential vasil@michev.info 

$jsonPayload = (@{userName=$cred.username;password=$cred.GetNetworkCredential().password;} | ConvertTo-Json).tostring() 

$cookie = (Invoke-RestMethod -contenttype "application/json" -method Post -uri "https://api.admin.microsoftonline.com/shdtenantcommunications.svc/Register" -body $jsonPayload).RegistrationCookie 

$jsonPayload = (@{lastCookie=$cookie;locale="en-US";preferredEventTypes=@(0,1)} | ConvertTo-Json).tostring() 

$events = (Invoke-RestMethod -contenttype "application/json" -method Post -uri "https://api.admin.microsoftonline.com/shdtenantcommunications.svc/GetEvents" -body $jsonPayload) 

$events.Events | ogv