New Message Trace in Office 365 Security & Compliance Center
Published May 02 2018 02:15 PM 69.6K Views

Overview

Message Trace is a key tool for email admins to troubleshoot and track the health of their organization's mail flow. Message Trace in the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) is a useful tool for tracing messages, but it's visually cluttered and confusing, and it lacks a number of more sophisticated capabilities. To make Message Trace more effective and easier for both professional and part-time email admins, we've redesigned Message Trace and placed it in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. The new Message Trace sports a streamlined, modern interface, and adds a number of new features that will help you get your job done more quickly and with greater effectiveness.

What's New

Message Trace Start Page

  • All your queries, extended message trace requests, and downloadable reports on a single page.
  • Save custom queries, for fast and error-free querying in the future.
  • Recent queries are automatically saved – pick up where you left off, no need to start from scratch again.
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New Message Trace Panel

  • A more modern, streamlined and intuitive interface that's simpler to understand and use, helping you get your job done more quickly.
  • New inline address picker to select and validate senders and recipients with fewer clicks.
  • New time range slider to easily and visually choose common query start and end times.
  • You can now view up to the last 10 days of data in real-time (previously limited to 7 days).
  • Downloadable extended message trace reports are now available for any date range, not just those starting more than 7 days ago.
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Updated Results Panel

  • View up to 10,000 records in the Results panel (previous maximum was 1,000).
  • Results are displayed in your default or custom time zone, instead of UTC.
  • Filter results by Sender, Recipient, Subject or Status.
  • Export the results you want to a CSV file (all, filtered, loaded, or selected).
  • Find related message records: Select an item and find all related items that share the same message ID.
  • Color-coded delivery status makes it easier to quickly spot possible issues.
  • View message details more easily with a single click, or from the more info (. . .) fly-out menu.
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Message Details Panel

While the key updates in the new Message Trace are the new start page and improvements to the search and results panels, the Message Trace details panel was also updated. The details panel continues to provide the same rich, diagnostics and recovery guidance as before, but it's been slightly streamlined, now using expandable sections to tuck the message events and more information details out of the way until you need them. newtrace4 The new Message Trace in the Security & Compliance Center is deploying now and should be available for all Office 365 customers by the middle of May.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I find the new Message Trace? You can access the new Message Trace from the Security & Compliance Center navigation menu Mail Flow > Message Trace. Will the new Message Trace replace Message Trace in Exchange Admin Center (EAC)? No. The new Message Trace is only available in the Security & Compliance Center (SCC). The legacy Message Trace in the EAC and the new Message Trace in SCC will co-exist for the foreseeable future. Why is the new Message Trace located in the Security & Compliance Center instead of the Exchange Admin Center? A significant part of an email admin's day-to-day job is keeping their organization's email secure, reducing or eliminating spam, protecting users from phishing and malware attacks, and preventing sensitive data from leaving the organization (data loss prevention or DLP). We've placed the new Message Trace in the SCC alongside the email antispam, antimalware, and DLP tools that already exist in the SCC, to give email admins a single location that hosts most of the tools they regularly work with. What roles are required to access Message Trace in the SCC? The new Message Trace in the SCC supports the same roles as the legacy Message Trace in the EAC, including Global administrator, Exchange administrator, and others. Will this new Message Trace ship to on-premises Exchange? At this time, we have no plans to ship this on-premises. The Security & Compliance Center is a purely online portal and does not exist in our on-premises releases. If my organization is in Hybrid mode – what happens? You will still be able to use this, but only for email traffic that goes through our cloud infrastructure. You will not be able to use this to track messages that are sent purely on-premises. Kevin Shaughnessy
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Version history
Last update:
‎Jul 01 2019 04:33 PM
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