Release Summary

This release focuses on improving signal quality, administrative confidence, and secure monitoring across the platform and Microsoft workloads. Key enhancements include smarter alert tuning to reduce noise, safeguards that make alert changes reversible, expanded support for MFA-secured monitoring accounts, and deeper visibility into critical systems and Exchange health. We also continue our modernization efforts by expanding functionality available on the web console.

Note: The following new requirements for ENow Management System v8.6

• The ENow Client and Remote Probe require Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8

Alerting Intelligence & Resilience

• Observation Mode and Automatic Tuning
• Alert Settings Backup and Restore

Security & Compliance

• MFA support for Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive monitoring accounts
• SharePoint Sites that are Shared With All Users, Everyone, and Everyone Except External Users

Microsoft Teams Enhancements

• Modernize the Microsoft Teams Poor Call due to Audio for Microsoft Teams CQD Support Portal, Microsoft Teams Poor Call Snapshot, and Large Meeting Performance Dashboard
• Enhance the Microsoft Teams Poor Call features to include Video and VBSS

Exchange Online Enhancements

• Exchange Online Cloud Mail Flow test to provide alerts for round trip time

Platform & Infrastructure Visibility

• Event ID Monitoring

Exchange Enhancements

• Exchange Back Pressure Monitoring
• Exchange User Mailbox Report Enhancements
• Exchange External Mail Flow test to provide alerts for round trip time

Active Directory Enhancements

• DNS Server monitoring tests for Domain Controllers

Platform Modernization

• Continued Migration to Web Console
• DNS Name Resolution monitoring tests for All Server types
   

ENow for Microsoft 365

New Features

MFA support for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive monitoring test accounts (20405)

We now support using an MFA-enabled monitoring test account for synthetic tests in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. This added flexibility, along with existing support for MFA-enabled monitoring test account use for Exchange Online synthetic tests, ensures that workload administrators can configure their monitoring test accounts to follow their organization’s security requirements.

SharePoint Sites that are Shared With All Users, Everyone, and Everyone Except External Users (21933)

SharePoint administrators need to be able to detect sites that have been shared with Everyone except external users. This helps you ensure that the security groups called: All Users, Everyone, and Everyone except external users are not being misused by being assigned memberships to sites that are considered confidential and not approved for all internal users to view.

Modernize the Microsoft Teams Poor Call due to Audio for Microsoft Teams CQD Support Portal, Microsoft Teams Poor Call Snapshot, and Large Meeting Performance Dashboard (21990)

Microsoft recently made changes to the Microsoft Teams Admin API that is utilized for determining if users are encountering poor calls or poor meetings. The information that was available from the Microsoft Teams Admin API was very useful in mentioning that the experience was marked as poor. However, additional information is available from the tool tip in the admin center report output. This information will now be included in the improved Large Meeting Performance Dashboard to provide Teams Admins with more accurate measurements of poor audio user experience.

Enhance the Microsoft Teams Poor Call features to include Video and VBSS (21997)

To provide additional value to the Microsoft Teams Poor Call features, we added data collection for poor calls to include video and VBSS. Video reporting will help to identify freezes, frame loss, and codec adaptation. VBSS reporting will validate UDP readiness and screen sharing reliability. Both new features will now be available as part of the ENow Microsoft Teams governance pack.

Exchange Online Cloud Mail Flow test to provide alerts for round trip time (22020)

Since the recent Exchange Online outage on January 22^nd, 2026, we noted an opportunity to further enhance the Cloud Mail Flow test. While working with our customers who were able to detect with the Cloud Mail Flow test that Exchange Online was encountering an issue, we discovered another metric that would have provided additional insights. This was the round-trip time to send and then receive the test message back. Turns out, we already collected this data and presented it on the OneLook Dashboard, but we decided that introducing a threshold for alerting purposes would be a game changer for environments that measure mail delivery very closely.

Resolved Issues

ENow for Exchange

New Features

Exchange Back Pressure Monitoring (21929)

For the new Exchange Server Subscription Edition, we now support pressure monitoring. This feature will save Exchange administrators valuable time and alert them to the various states of back pressure for all the monitored Exchange servers in the environment. Having this new feature combined with existing Exchange monitoring features will ensure that mail remains flowing.

Exchange User Mailbox Report Enhancements (21345)

You can now add user-related attribute information to all the Exchange reports that contain user mailboxes. This will help Exchange administrators and other team members that consume these reports with added flexibility for viewing live or exporting to PDF or CSV.

Exchange External Mail Flow test to provide alerts for round trip time (22020)

The Exchange External Mail Flow test is the older twin monitoring test compared to the Exchange Online Cloud Mail Flow monitoring test. Since we made an improvement to the latter (see page 6 item 22020), naturally we could not ignore the other.

Moved Exchange Backup Options to Alert Settings – Alert Thresholds – Universal Policy (21302)

Moved Exchange Database Size and Whitespace Options to Alert Settings – Alert Thresholds – Universal Policy (21721)

Resolved Issues

ENow for Active Directory

New Features

DNS Server monitoring tests for Domain Controllers (21365)

DNS monitoring is critical for your organization since it is relied upon heavily for directing all client requests to the correct endpoints. There are several things that can negatively impact DNS such as:

• Misconfigurations
• Delays in replication
• Network connectivity
• Server Maintenance
• DNS Poisoning
• DDoS

What can be done to ensure that DNS is properly monitored? The ENow Management System 8.6 offers 2 new monitoring features that will provide complete visibility of the DNS health.

The first monitoring feature that we implemented is called DNS Server Functionality and is focused on validating the availability of core DNS server functionality from the Domain Controller itself. This feature specifically validates the following core functions of a DNS Server:

• DNS Server Functionality (this is a synthetic test that runs locally on the domain controller to continuously validate DNS functionality for IPv4 and IPv6)
• DNS Server Settings (this is a health check to make sure that DNS remains configured properly)
• Domain Records (this is a health check to make sure that the proper domain records are available to the server)
• Forest Records (this is a health check to make sure that the proper forest records are available to the server)
• Forwarder Functionality (this is a synthetic test that runs locally on the domain controller to continuously validate Forwarder functionality for IPv4 and IPv6)
• Host Name Records (this is a health check to make sure that the proper host name records are available to the server)
• Root Hints Functionality (this is a synthetic test that runs locally on the domain controller to continuously validate Root Hints functionality for IPv4 and IPv6)

Platform

New Features

Observation Mode & Automatic Tuning (21887)

We have introduced Observation Mode and Automatic Tuning to first intelligently observe the alert behavior of the environment and then recommend adjustments to reduce noise and improve signal quality in our monitoring system. The recommended adjustments may be automatically applied with the Automatic Tuning component of this feature. These new enhancements continue to work with existing alert settings to intelligently filter out transient conditions, ensuring that alerts are meaningful, actionable, and less likely to generate unnecessary noise.

DNS Name Resolution monitoring tests for All Server types (21366)

This new monitoring feature is focused on verifying the name server lookup functions from a remote server that relies upon DNS (from a domain controller and/or also 3^rd party DNS appliance). This feature is very flexible as it can be configured to run from the EMS web server and any other monitored server (in the future we will also provide this monitoring function to the remote probes). It also can be configured to monitor any host name record type such as:

• A
• AAAA
• CNAME
• MX
• NS
• SOA
• SRV
• TXT

The combination of the DNS Server and the DNS Name Resolution monitoring features in EMS 8.6 will provide organizations with the complete perspective as it relates to DNS availability, functionality, and health for the Active Directory environment.

Alert Settings – Backup & Restore (21781)

You can now back up or restore all alert settings. This feature comes on the heels of Alert Observation and Automatic Tuning, so administrators can rest assured they can revert to previous alert settings if needed. After upgrading to EMS 8.6 and each subsequent upgrade, the system will automatically back up all of the alert settings.

Event ID Monitoring (21520)

We have introduced Event ID monitoring as a feature for any server running the ENow Client. The feature is customizable in nature where administrators can specify any event ID and source to zero in on the application or system events that are critical to alert on to prevent a service outage. This new feature will benefit many different servers such as Domain Controllers, Exchange Servers, Federation Servers, Microsoft Entra ID Connect Servers, SQL servers, etc.

Continued Migration to Web Console (platform)

• Moved Alert Exclusions to Alert Settings menu (21270)
• Moved HTTP Proxy to Global Settings menu (21284)
• Moved Auto Refresh Interval to Global Settings menu (21281).
• Moved Agent Authorization to Global Settings menu (21280)
• Moved Log Level to Global Settings menu (21285).
• Moved SQL Options to Global Settings menu (21289).
• Moved Subscription Status to Global Settings menu (21290).

Resolved Issues

Known Limitations