Usage guide: OneDrive - Stability and compliance

Overview

For many companies, Microsoft OneDrive has become an essential tool for facilitating and improving employee collaboration. It is imperative, therefore, that IT teams can monitor the status of this application across the organization in terms of performance, stability, adoption, and network connectivity.

Problem

Application instability or network connectivity issues with OneDrive will result in employee frustration and could lead to data security issues.

This library pack will help you monitor, manage, and enhance the OneDrive experience across your landscape to ensure that employees can collaborate effectively without frustration, and that company data is protected. This page will guide you through the structure of the content and how it can be used. 

Please keep in mind this is a guide and represents just some of the potential insight and actions you can take. There are many use cases and specific troubleshooting scenarios that you might uncover in your environment. 

Configuration

Ensure your library pack is properly configured by following the steps highlighted in its configuration guide:

Configuration Guide: OneDrive - Stability and compliance

Pack structure

Visibility 

The "OneDrive - Stability and compliance" live dashboard acts as the starting point of this library pack. It provides visibility into your OneDrive landscape to easily monitor and uncover any issues and/or areas of improvement. 

Advanced troubleshooting and remediation 

For more in-depth investigations, you can rely on the results of specific data-gathering remote actions. 

• Get OneDrive Status: Provides additional insights into the installation status of OneDrive clients

• Get OneDrive Information: Provides additional insights into the cloud storage usage of OneDrive clients

• Get OneDrive Sync Status: Provides additional insights into the synchronization status of OneDrive.

Some of these data-gathering remote actions are used to populate the live dashboard and should already be scheduled. You can query the results by investigating KPIs from the Live dashboard or from your own investigations.

To resolve some of the detected issues, the following remote actions can be triggered when required: 

• Repair OneDrive: Performs a OneDrive repair or reinstallation on the device, mitigating possible sync issues.

• Restart OneDrive: Restarts the OneDrive client which is used to synchronize files and folders. OneDrive will attempt to perform a synchronization after the restart.

Identify areas of improvement 

In the dashboard's summary tab, you can access a helicopter view of where you might have problematic areas. Based on this information, you can navigate to the respective tab to troubleshoot in more details.  

The filters above the dashboard can help you focus your visibility on a specific area, device or platform type. The time picker can also be used to look at your data on more granular or longer-term time scale. 

Tracking compliance

Microsoft OneDrive has become an essential tool for facilitating and improving employee collaboration, as well as protecting company documents stored on local devices from hardware failure. As a result it is imperative that OneDrive is installed, and kept up-to-date, on all required devices.

Using the Compliance tab, it is possible to identify devices with OneDrive not installed, or with OneDrive installed but not running. This information is provided by the remote action “Get OneDrive Status”. The first step to investigate this issue would be to run this remote action again on the identified devices, as it is possible that they were in the process of booting up, or receiving an update when the remote action last ran. To select the devices use the drill down function from the relevant KPI.

If problems persist then the “Repair OneDrive” remote action can be used to either repair or reinstall the OneDrive client. Be aware that the “Repair” option may delete all non synchronized files from the OneDrive folder on the client, so these should ideally be backed up first.
As this remote action simultaneously downloads and installs the latest version of Microsoft OneDrive on all targeted devices, please ensure that the available network capacity is appropriate for the number of targeted devices.

Also shown in this section are devices with configuration issues, such as missing folders or environment variables. These devices will not be compliant and are unlikely to be syncing properly. These issues are unlikely to be transient so the first solution would be to try the “Repair OneDrive” remote action on these devices.

Tracking device synchronization

In order to ensure the security of company data, and the effective collaboration of files within teams, all OneDrive clients must remained synchronized with the server whenever they are online.

Non-compliant devices are unlikely to be synchronizing properly. Devices identified in the preceding section “Tracking compliance” should be investigated as a matter of priority.

The Synchronization tab identifies devices that are reporting synchronization issues, and those with a high count of failed file uploads. To help resolve these issues the following remote actions can be run on the affected devices. To select the devices use the drill down function from the relevant KPI.

• Restart OneDrive: Assists in scenarios whereby OneDrive is failing to synchronize. It restarts the OneDrive client and will attempt to perform a synchronization after the restart.

• Reset OneDrive: Assists in scenarios whereby OneDrive is failing to synchronize. It uses the Microsoft recommended method to reset the OneDrive client and will then perform a full sync after the reset. No data is lost by resetting OneDrive.

Tracking OneDrive storage

To maximize employee productivity and ensure that company data is protected, the amount and type of OneDrive storage in use by devices should be monitored.

• Business Cloud storage: This section is dedicated to the storage used by all devices running OneDrive for Business. Any devices with little or no storage should be investigated, as there could be a configuration issue and company data may be at risk. Likewise, devices using an excessive amount of storage might indicate a configuration issue, or a need to educate the employee on the best use of OneDrive, as they may be using it to store excessively large files (e.g. OST files, virtual machine disk files, or snapshots etc).

• Personal cloud storage: The use of personal cloud storage may simply be the result of mis-configuration on a device, but it may contravene company policy and be considered a security risk. Devices with personal cloud storage only should be investigated as a matter of priority as company data may not be stored in the correct location or with the right retention policy.