What is the Health Check Mechanism?

The Health Check Mechanism (HCM) is a feature that checks certain Microsoft subscription and asset product types for provisioning discrepancies, such as their status and number of licenses, between their records in the BSS and the Microsoft Partner Center (MPC).

The HCM runs automatically four times a day and collects Microsoft subscriptions and assets from all instances which have been created or updated in the BSS since the last check. Items can also be added to the HCM manually. This list is then emailed to all BSS administrators.

Checks Performed by the HCM & Eligible Product Types

First, corresponding MPC items are identified and cross-referenced with their counterparts in the BSS. Then, the BSS checks if certain parameters are synchronized on the two platforms. The current eligible product types and the parameters checked by the HCM can be seen in the following table:

Actions Which Make Subscriptions/Assets Eligible

Subscriptions and Assets are automatically included in the HCM when the following actions are taken:

• Subscription Create Actions

  • Create subscription

  • Create a trial

  • Execute order

  • Storefront checkout

• Asset Create Actions

  • Create Asset

  • Execute order

  • Storefront checkout

• Subscription Update Actions

  • Change quantity

  • Suspend subscription

  • Reactivate

  • Cancel subscription

  • Add addon 

  • Change addon quantity

  • Cancel addon

  • Upgrade trial to paid

  • Upgrade/downgrade subscription

  • Auto-renew trial subscriptions

  • Auto-renew paid subscriptions

• Asset Cancellation

Enabling the HCM for Your Organization

Initially, for the HCM to check your Microsoft Subscriptions and Assets, the HCM must be manually enabled for your BSS Organization. The HCM is disabled by default to avoid feeding unnecessary data into the mechanism.

To view the HCM page, enter the BSS Setup and navigate to Tools → Health Check Mechanism.

Open

To include your organization in the HCM, and thus enable it, select Yes as shown in the figure below:

Open

Viewing HCM Discrepancies & Logs

The HCM page contains three tabs, Current Check, Previous Checks, and Logs. The first two tabs are utilized to differentiate between items for which actions must be taken, whereas the third tab is utilized for BSS users to check the exact actions the tool performed.

Current Check Tab

The Current Check tab shows all the items with discrepancies between the BSS and MPC detected last time the HCM was run. Any items detected in previously run checks which have not been corrected will remain on the list.

You can export the list of items with discrepancies, as seen in the figure above, to Excel by selecting Export to Excel.

Previous Checks Tab

The Previous Checks tab lists the items with discrepancies found in previous checks, excluding the most recent check.

The tabs contain the following columns:

• Comments: The discrepancies found between the BSS entry and the Partner Center entry. These can be expanded by clicking on the arrow at the beginning of the row.

• Check Date: The date the discrepancies were found.

• Description: The subscription/asset name in the BSS - this is a link to the subscription/asset view. Hovering over shows the BSS ID.

• Product Name: The product name as displayed in the BSS.

• Product Type: The product type of the subscription or asset.

• Customer: The name of the account in the BSS that purchased the item.

• Quantity*: The quantity of the subscription/asset in the BSS.

• Billing Cycle: Unit of measurement of the item (Monthly/Annually/One-time).

• Status*: The status of the subscription/asset in the BSS.

• Microsoft ID: The subscription ID for subscriptions or order ID for assets in the MPC.

• Tenant ID: Partner Center customer ID.

*Values of fields marked with asterisks (*) are not live. These values were found during a check and are accurate only for that specific point in time.

Logs Tab

The Logs tab can be used for troubleshooting purposes since it lists every action of the HCM tool, from the time it is automatically initiated until the time it finishes, for every run.

The tabs contain the following columns:

• Creation Date: Is the date and time (BSS organization time) that the subscription or asset was added for a health check.

• Log Type: This column displays one of the following values depending on the state of the mechanism in the given timeframe.

  • Mechanism: This value contains a variety of meanings such as when the organization was included or excluded from the HCM tool, whether there was a general system error, whether there was a corrupted (incomplete) run, and when the service of the mechanism was started, stopped, and restarted.

  • Buffering: This value appears when the HCM starts or finishes the process of collecting and loading the data before the actual health check occurs.

    • Add to Buffer (1/3): This value appears when subscriptions or assets are collected which is part of the overall buffering.

  • Checking: This value appears when the HCM starts or finishes the comparison of subscriptions and assets with the Partner Center.

    • Add to Buffer (2/3): This value appears when subscriptions and assets are loaded to the tool after being found as problematic during checking.

  • Add to Buffer (3/3): This value appears when subscriptions and assets are manually inserted into the tool by the BSS user (via the Add to Health Check button), this has Check ID= On-demand.

  • Notification: This value appears when the notification email is dispatched to the BSS admin(s).

• Check ID: Is the ID of each run of the HCM. This field can be utilized for filtering out a specific run.

• Tenant ID: Is the Microsoft Tenant ID from the Partner Center.

• Customer: Is the name of the BSS account.

• Description: Is the BSS name of either the subscription or the asset.

• Product Type: Is the product type of the product inside of the subscription or asset.

• Status: Is the status of each Log Type value. The available statuses are the following:

  • Completed: This value appears when the Log Type value is completed.

  • Started: This value appears when the Log Type value has started.

  • Ended: This value appears when the Log Type value has ended.

  • Failed: This value appears when the Log Type value has failed for the reason described under the Comments column.

  • Skipped: This value appears when a notification email cannot be dispatched for the reason described under the Comments column.

  • Warning: This value usually appears when the mechanism stops.

• Comments: These are user-friendly details about each entry.
  The logs will be sorted by date and time, starting from the most recent entry.

Viewing Discrepancy Details

To view the discrepancy details of a specific Subscription or an Asset, click the arrow located at the beginning of the row.

In the BSS, in the Subscription or Asset view, any items found to have discrepancies are marked with a yellow ribbon. The ribbon contains a link to view the item on the HCM page.

Viewing the Details from MPC

Click on Show to see the details of all items with the selected item’s SKU from the MPC in a pop-up window.

The pop-up window shows additional details:

This pop-up window has the following columns, all with data retrieved from the MPC:

• ID: Is the subscription ID or order ID for assets.

• Name: Is the product name.

• Offer ID (SKU): Is the SKU ID from Microsoft.

• Quantity: Is the quantity of the subscription.

• Status: Is the status of the subscription or order.

• Start Date: Is the date when the subscription has begun.

Hovering over More Details in this pop-up shows a tooltip with additional information.

Details displayed for subscriptions:

• Unit Type: The type of unit for the current subscription.

• Auto-Renewal: Whether auto-renewal is enabled or not.

• End Date: The end date of the subscription.

Details displayed for assets:

• Availability: The Availability ID.

Additional Functions

There are some additional functions to make the entries more legible and to organize the data.

You can sort the entries by selecting the column to sort by or selecting the filter icon on a column and specifying an alphanumerical string to filter the results. Up to ten(10) filters can be active for a single column at the same time.

The HCM shows up to 25 results per page of results dating back to a maximum of 3 calendar months.

Adding Subscriptions or Assets to the HCM

It is possible to manually add items to the next health check mechanism to ensure that there are no discrepancies for the specific item. To add an item to the health check mechanism, click on the Add to Health Check button in the Subscription or Asset view page from the Shortcuts menu.

HCM Notification

An email notification is dispatched daily containing the results of the most recent check.

The notification is sent to all admin BSS users who have an address in the system. It is sent at 08:00 AM in the time zone of your BSS Organization.

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