Lync Online reporting
Like other Office 365 components (such as Exchange and SharePoint), Lync Online provides administrators with several different ways to retrieve and analyze information about the service and about such things as service usage. To begin with, the Office 365 Admin center includes a set of preconfigured reports that provide administrators with an overview of the Lync Online service as deployed in their organization. For example, the Peer-to-peer sessions report enables administrators to see, at a glance, information about the total number of peer-to-peer communication sessions that their users have participated in:
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Note
You must have an Office 365 subscription that includes both Lync Online and Exchange Online in order to access these reports. Exchange is required because the Lync Online reports are generated by using the Exchange reporting service.
Data returned by the Lync Online reports can be viewed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis; that enables administrators to look for such things as adoption rate (for example, are users participating in more conferences in June than they were in March?), and usage trends (for example, administrators might see that twice as many audio/video sessions are conducted on Thursdays as are conducted on Tuesdays). This type of data can be invaluable in areas as diverse as determining network bandwidth allocation; planning for future expansion and upgrades; and designing user education and training.
This documentation set focuses on the predefined reports found in the Admin center. Detailed information about using these reports, as well as information about the individual reports themselves, can be found in the following topics:
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TThe Peer-to-peer sessions report in Lync Online. Shows information about the number of peer-to-peer sessions that took place in your organization. (In Lync Online, a peer-to-peer session is a communication session involving just two users.)
The Conferences report in Lync Online. Shows information about the number of conferences that your users participated in. (In Lync Online, a conference is any communication session that involves 3 or more users.)
The Active users report in Lync Online. Shows the number of users who signed in to Lync and engaged in a Lync communication session (either a conference or a peer-to-peer session) during the specified time period.
The Audio minutes and Video minutes report in Lync Online. Shows the total number of minutes that your users spent in peer-to-peer audio and/or peer-to-peer video sessions, as well as the time spent in audio/video conferences.
In addition to these predefined reports, administrators can also use the OData data querying feature in Excel to create custom Office 365 reports; how-to instructions for using the OData feature can be found in the article Using Excel to Retrieve Office 365 Reporting Data. Custom reports give you the ability to dictate which data (and how much data) is returned from the Office 365 reporting service. Custom reports also enable you to do such things as specify how the data should be sorted and grouped, and provide access to information that is not available in the Office 365 Admin center reports.
Administrators who are familiar with Windows PowerShell can use the Exchange reporting cmdlets and the REST web service to return information about Lync Online and other Office 365 components. Administrators with a development background can also directly query the REST web service by using technologies such as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). For more information, see the article The Lync Online reporting cmdlets and REST web service.