Optimizing Customer Network Connectivity for #Microsoft 365 Copilot

Network connectivity page in M365 admin center is the go-to place for tenant, network security administrators to review health and readiness of customer network connectivity setup essential for M365 applications.

Problem statement

Customers blocking WebSocket connections in their network infrastructure leads to broken experience for M365 Copilot users. Copilot uses WebSocket and tenant admins have no visibility into the failed WebSocket connections for their users, rendering the customer network setup not ready for Copilot roll out.

Users with WebSocket connection failure will have a broken Copilot experience, here is a glimpse.

We are pleased to announce the following new features in M365 admin center that are available to all customers.

Admins can now view Service health notifications in Microsoft 365 admin center for Network insights detected for their tenant. They may also receive an email if opted-in to receive email notifications. The service health notification has a deep link that takes them directly to the detected network insight for their tenant, they will receive one notification per insight detected.

Detected network insights include failed network connections for M365 Copilot, this public article documents the three network insights we detect Microsoft 365 Network Insights - Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn

Failed HTTPS connections for Unified domains *.cloud.microsoft, *.static.microsoft, *.usercontent.microsoft

Failed WebSocket connections for *.cloud.microsoft

Network Intermediation (TLS break and inspect) impacting performance

I received a Service health notification for WebSocket or HTTPS connection failures, what should I do?

Within the Service health notification there is a hyperlink that directly takes you to the Insights page in Network Connectivity. You can also go to the Insights page and click on the network insight, this shows the locations for which the insight has been detected, click on any location to review the location specific details and summary, the location summary provides you information like egress IP addresses (your source IPs from where we see connection failures) for this location. More information available in this video.

1. Visibility into failed network connections for M365 Copilot

Tenant admins can now see in Microsoft 365 admin center (Microsoft 365 network connectivity - Microsoft 365 admin center) when their network impacts user connections to M365 apps, including WebSocket connections for M365 Copilot. The new report shows failure rate percentage, also known as the error rate percentage, for failed HTTPS and WebSocket connections to customer facing M365 Unified domains such as *.cloud.microsoft, *.static.microsoft, and *.usercontent.microsoft. A high error rate in this report indicates blocked network connections that impacts connectivity for various M365 applications and calls for immediate action from the tenant admin to allow blocked connections.

2. Visibility into user network latency for M365 Copilot

Tenant admins can now view the network assessment points for Microsoft 365 Copilot, the assessment points are based on the network latency experienced by Copilot users. The lower the network latency, the higher the network assessment points for Microsoft 365 Copilot, providing a clear picture for tenant admins about the high network latency experienced by their users for M365 Copilot.

In addition to the above, we recently announced M365 network connectivity test tool for individual users to test and validate if they successfully meet the network connectivity requirements for M365 Copilot.

Additional reading references: