In the past few months Microsoft has been making subtle and not so subtle changes to the Remote Connectivity Analyzer. You may not even recognize it in it’s current form if you have used it in the past and are coming back to it for troubleshooting. In this blog post we will briefly examine each of the items that are available in the RCA tool. Microsoft has produced a coulple of shortened URLs to help make the web address more memorable:
Short URLs:
Aka.ms/rca
Aka.ms/jeffsfavtool (inspired by one of the tools biggest champions – Jeff Guillet)
Now on to the new look!
Here is the new interface:
This new styling is certainly more in line with the current look of Office 365 admin interfaces. Each of the test are now represented visually as ‘cards’. You will find that not all pages are changed and can probably count on these changes over the coming months. So what exactly has changed with the tool recently? Well, let’s refer to their change logs, aka ‘Version’ page”
Bottom right of the page:
If we click on the version, we are taken to this link – https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/Pages/ChangeList.htm – and displays this list: (Included are the top entries only)
Notice that there is a very large gap of over 4 years between Oct 2015 and Jan 2020 when the more recent changes started to occur. What this means is that Microsoft is listening and investing time and resources into this beloved tool. Now let’s explore the new interface to see what this really means.
Office 365
Since this is our default tab on the left, we can start with that. As a consultant I find that 90% of my migrations are from an on-premises mail system to Exchange Online. So this tab is an important one when I need a troubleshooting tool. It is not the only tool, but it is important.
Test #1
First test is checking out DNS for a particular domain in Exchange Online (this test does not exist for Exchange Server):
Enter the domain to diagnose:
Make sure to verify your CAPTCHA entry:
Then click on ‘Perform Test’: (expanded results are shown below)
We can save thee files for later reporting or just general documentation by clicking on the icons on the far right side: (not the most intuitive and the icons are meh)
Test #2
Lync DNS addresses:
This test is specific to Lync DNS entries that are used in Office 365. These records can be see in the Microsoft 365 main admin page, under Setup – Domains and could look like this, depending on what features that were selected for this domain:
When we click on the test, we are taken to the test page where we need to enter a valid email address.
A successful test would look like this:
Test #3
Imagine that you would like to test the Single Sign-On abilities of a user in your tenant. This this is one that could be used to help troubleshoot issues with that process:
For the account that needs verification, we can enter the user’s UPN and password:
Sample failed test:
Test #4
This test is for your ActiveSync connections to Office 365:
Enter a mailbox to test, along with the login and password for testing ActiveSync:
A full successful test is rather long and the downloaded successful HTML results are provided here for review:
RCATestResult
Test #5
Test 5 centers on EWS connectivity for clients that use EWS to connect to a mailbox like Entourage for example:
Just like other tests, we can enter credentials of a mailbox to test:
Provided below is a sample failed test:
This failed test is due to a response from something other than Office 365 as discussed HERE
Test #6
This is an impersonation test and is relevant for testing accounts that will use Exchange Impersonation to access user’s mailboxes:
Here we need to enter an account to test and we can also check the Impersonation checkbox to make sure the rights assigned to an account work properly:
Test #7
Client connectivity testing with RPC over HTTP and MAPI:
Enter the information for the mailbox to test:
Check your results. In this case, success:
Test #8
Checking inbound emails to your Exchange online tenant:
Simply provide an email address to test and off it goes:
Test #9
Testing your server’s ability to send emails
Enter a server IP, check the checkboxes you wish to check and enter a recipient email address:
The the test will run and provide it’s findings and any potential issues found:
Test #10
We also have the ability to check for valid POP connections:
For Office 365, we would enter details that are for POP access like so:
And if it is enabled, we should get a positive result:
Test #11
Same test as POP, but for IMAP is available:
Enter IMAP server information::
And we get our successful results if the protocol is available:
Test #12
Lastly we have a free busy test available:
We can enter information on the accounts to test with:
Failure:
Success:
Exchange Server On-premises
What’s nice about this tool is that in addition to testing an Office 365 deployment, we can also use it to test an Exchange on-premises environment as well. There is a large difference in the number if tests however, as we are left with eight tests instead of Office 365’s twelve.
We are missing ‘Help Identify My Issue with Exchange DNS’, ‘Help Identity My Issue with Lync DNS’, ‘Help Identify My Issue with Single Sign-On’ and ‘Free Busy’. Most of the removals make sense as they are focused on Exchange Online/Office 365. I won’t run through these tests as they are similar to the ones for Office 365.
Other Tools
Under Other Tools, there are two useful items that can be clicked on. One is Message Analyzer and Sara Client.
When clicking on Message Analyzer, you are taken to this link: https://mha.azurewebsites.net/
Paste a header:
Then click on ‘Analyze Headers’:
There is also a feedback button on the tool, make to click on that for any suggestions you may have.
Sara Client
Click on this link takes you here – About the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant
We can then download the client and use it on our desktop.
** Note ** To be honest, the file download name for the Sara tool is atrocious – SetupProd.exe – Could be named much better, but that’s just my opinion.
