Exchange Online Performance Tests Protocol

At GSX we work with a lot of customers that have moved, are moving, or plan to move to Office 365.  

We help them assess their Office 365 environment before, during and after the migration, as well as make them understand the end-user experience that they really deliver to their end-users. 

In one of our “business stories” we mentioned how migrating to the cloud could directly impact the Outlook performance.

In this graph, we compare the timetable between end-user actions performed on Exchange servers and their Office 365 tenant. 

This example, done for a large bank in North America, shows that simply monitoring an “open mailbox” is not sufficient. Each action matters and has its own “user threshold”; when exceeded you will have to deal with an influx of complaints and open tickets. 

Office 365 has been built to enforce capable security and high availability and we can say that it was a huge success.

The downside, of course, is that these two main concerns impact performance.
Even if the cloud provides a service a bit slower than former on-premises servers, it would be a mistake to believe that the cloud services themselves are responsible for the rise of end-user complaints.

After dozens of projects with our customers, we’ve realized that 9 times out of 10, end-user experience issues were related to the hybrid network and server components necessary to run a cloud service.

The main issue was that, before the deployment of GSX, there was nothing to measure end-user experience and correlate that with independent network and hybrid components metrics.

So, in order to provide data and feedback, we decided to run a few experiments in our distributed environment and share our findings with you.

We deployed a few GSX Robot Users at critical locations, to mimic customer activity, and started to measure the standard end-user experience; action per action as well as critical network metrics to have an idea on their impact on end-user experience.