Microsoft's Health dashboard gives you what Microsoft Learn calls "a snapshot of the overall health of your environment": service incidents, license use, app updates and MFA. Workspace growth, inactive sites, missing owners, guests, sharing and storage aren't among its sections; those sit in at least four more admin surfaces.
A Microsoft 365 tenant health check is a regular summary of how your tenant is governed: how fast workspaces are growing, how many are inactive or missing owners, how many guests and sharing links exist, how storage is trending, and where your security posture stands, compared with the last period. The five minutes is the time it takes to read and forward a report that's already been generated on a schedule.
When you need every workspace, owner and sharing link listed, that's a full Microsoft 365 tenant inventory, a different job.
Microsoft 365 Health dashboard in the admin center showing service health, usage and recommended actions
You open the Health dashboard from the admin center's view dropdown (Simplified view, Dashboard view, Health), signed in with the Global Reader role. Alerts sit at the top: general service incidents and billing problems such as an expired subscription. Below them are your top services' status, daily usage, license utilization, desktop app updates and recommended actions such as turning on MFA.
Service health is one part of that picture. It shows the health state of each Microsoft service with any active incidents and advisories, and its history tab covers issues resolved in the last 7 or 30 days. Planned maintenance doesn't appear there; you'll find it in Message center.
Both pages tell you whether Microsoft 365 is running and being used, a fair answer to part of leadership's question. The governance half, meaning how many workspaces you have, who owns them, who outside the organization has access and what's shared, isn't on either page.
Seven numbers make up the governance answer:
Two comparisons make them readable: the change since last period and how you compare with organizations of a similar size.
By our count, the governance numbers sit in at least four more admin surfaces: the Microsoft 365 admin center's reports, the Defender portal, the Microsoft Entra admin center and the SharePoint admin center. Each has its own time window and, in places, its own license requirement.
| Surface | Where | What it answers | Time window | Access or license note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Usage reports | Microsoft 365 admin center > Reports > Usage | Activity per service, such as SharePoint site usage and Teams team activity | 7, 30, 90 or 180 days; data typically 24 to 72 hours behind | Names hidden by default until a Global Administrator changes the setting |
| Adoption Score | Microsoft 365 admin center > Reports > Adoption Score | How people use Microsoft 365, compared with organizations of a similar size | Last 28 days, updated daily | Organization level only; not available in GCC, GCC High or DoD |
| Microsoft Secure Score | Microsoft Defender portal | Security posture, measured by recommended actions taken | Syncs daily | Recommendations for supported products you're licensed for |
| Microsoft Entra recommendations | Microsoft Entra admin center > identity overview > Recommendations | Identity configuration compared with security best practice | Analyzed daily | Some recommendations need a P2 or other license |
| Data access governance and site lifecycle reports | SharePoint admin center | Sharing activity; site ownership, inactivity and attestation | Activity reports: last 28 days; lifecycle reports: each policy run | SharePoint Advanced Management: base license plus a Copilot license, the Plan 1 add-on or Microsoft 365 E7; E5 alone gets activity reports for up to 10,000 sites |
Lined up, the windows don't match: usage reports run from 7 to 180 days, Adoption Score and the sharing activity reports look back 28 days, and Service health history stops at 30.
Count OneDrive when you count sharing links. Based on Orchestry data, the split is lopsided: 92% of company "Anyone" sharing links were found in OneDrives.
Microsoft Secure Score measures your security posture, and a higher score means more of Microsoft's recommended actions are in place. Its recommendations cover products including Microsoft Entra ID, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online and Purview Information Protection, and it already compares your score with similar organizations.
Microsoft is direct about the limit: the score reflects how far you're using security controls that help offset breach risk, and Microsoft says it isn't an absolute measure of how likely a breach is. Put it beside the six governance numbers as the summary's security input.
You can build this by hand in any tool, a spreadsheet included.
By hand, that's a recurring export-and-paste job across four portals, competing with everything else on a lean team's list. Monash Health manages Microsoft 365 for 30,000 users with a core team of only three people, and the Monash Health case study shows how reporting and automation helped that team reduce sprawl.
Orchestry's health checks generate this report on a schedule you set: monthly, quarterly or semi-annually. Each pulls workspace growth by type, sharing links created in the last 180 days, storage across OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange, Teams engagement and Secure Score into a single report, so steps 1 to 3 happen without exports.
Read the change since last period first, then the benchmarks, then the recommendations. Direction shows whether things are improving, benchmarks show whether the level is typical, and recommendations say what happens next.
Orchestry health check report benchmarking workspace inactivity and guest accounts against similar-size organizations, beside Microsoft Secure Score
Orchestry's health checks show whether your workspace count grew or shrank since the last period. Workspace inactivity and guest accounts are compared with organizations of a similar size, with trend lines since the last period, and Microsoft Secure Score sits beside them with Microsoft's own peer comparison.
Your open Orchestry recommendations follow, sorted by most urgent, so the last thing leadership reads is the to-do list.
Orchestry health check report in review, with an annotation and a custom recommendation added before publishing
With the review process turned on, new reports start in a Ready for Review state, where Orchestry admins and assigned reviewers annotate any section and add custom recommendations for the action items. Those custom recommendations also land on Orchestry's Recommendations page.
Publishing makes the report available to viewers who aren't Orchestry admins, such as your leadership team, and notifies them by email and in Microsoft Teams. It downloads in a PDF-friendly format with your company logo.
A scheduled report is a summary on a fixed date, and problems shouldn't wait for it. Keep alerts and recommendations running between reports, so the report shows what changed and what you already did about it.
Orchestry Workspace Dashboard counting workspaces by type, with active, inactive and lifecycle status tiles
Between reports, Orchestry's recommendations scan your environment every night and surface issues such as stale workspaces, guest access and missing owners. When a health check number moves, Orchestry's workspace reporting gives you the list behind it across Teams, SharePoint and Viva Engage, with filterable views and actions you can take from the report.
Leadership gets the five-minute read on a fixed date, and you work the detail underneath it the rest of the month.
"Orchestry has been a set-and-forget solution for us. It's very low touch for IT, but delivers very high value across the University." - Robert Jurgensen, Head of Cloud Infrastructure, University of Waikato
The Health dashboard and Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center show whether Microsoft 365 is running. For governance, track workspace growth, inactivity, ownership, guests, sharing links, storage and Secure Score against the last period, and report them to leadership on a schedule.
It's in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Sign in with the Global Reader role and choose Health from the Simplified view, Dashboard view and Health dropdown. Service health is under Health > Service health.
Service health reports on Microsoft's services: each one's health state, active incidents and advisories, and issues resolved in the last 7 or 30 days. Tenant health is how your own tenant is governed: workspace growth, inactivity, ownership, guests, sharing, storage and security posture over time.
It measures one part of it. Secure Score reflects how many of Microsoft's recommended security actions you've taken, and Microsoft says it isn't an absolute measure of how likely a breach is. Use it as the security input beside the governance numbers.
Natively, you can export usage reports to Excel or Power BI, or pull them through the Microsoft Graph reports API, then build the comparison yourself. Orchestry's health checks generate the report on a monthly, quarterly or semi-annual schedule and notify the viewers you name once it's published.
Match the cadence to how often leadership reviews IT. Microsoft suggests running data access governance snapshot reports quarterly and activity reports monthly, which makes monthly or quarterly a sensible default.
If you'd rather not rebuild your Microsoft 365 tenant health check by hand every period, see how Orchestry's health checks schedule, review and publish it. Book a walkthrough in your own tenant.