Study guide
4.1 Monitoring Adoption & Usage
Microsoft 365 Administrator Expert MS-102
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1 Introduction & Exam Overview
1.1 MS-102 Exam Facts & Blueprint 1.2 Registration, Retake & Renewal 1.3 Study Strategy & Using This Guide
2 Tenant Setup, Domains & Org Settings
2.1 Creating a Microsoft 365 Tenant 2.2 Implementing and Managing Domains 2.3 Configuring Org Settings: Security, Privacy & Profile
3 Service Health, Network & Software Updates
3.1 Monitoring Service Health & Notifications 3.2 Network Connectivity Insights 3.3 Configuring & Monitoring Software Updates
4 Adoption, Usage & Microsoft 365 Backup
4.1 Monitoring Adoption & Usage 4.2 Configuring & Managing Microsoft 365 Backup
5 Users, Contacts, Groups & Shared Mailboxes
5.1 Creating & Managing Users Including External Users 5.2 Creating & Managing Contacts 5.3 Managing Microsoft 365 Groups & Shared Mailboxes
6 Licensing & Bulk User Management
6.1 Managing & Monitoring Microsoft 365 Licenses 6.2 Bulk User Management with Graph & Entra PowerShell
7 Roles, Admin Units & Privileged Identity Management
7.1 Implementing & Managing Roles in M365 & Entra ID 7.2 Managing Permissions for Defender XDR, Purview & Workloads 7.3 Managing Delegation with Administrative Units 7.4 Managing Entra ID Roles in PIM
8 Identity Synchronization with Entra Connect
8.1 Preparing for Identity Synchronization & IdFix 8.2 Directory Sync with Entra Connect Sync & Cloud Sync 8.3 Monitoring Sync with Entra Connect Health 8.4 Troubleshooting Synchronization
9 Authentication, SSPR & Password Protection
9.1 Implementing & Managing Authentication Methods 9.2 Self-Service Password Reset (SSPR) 9.3 Microsoft Entra Password Protection 9.4 Investigating & Resolving Authentication Issues
10 Identity Protection, Conditional Access & MFA
10.1 Planning for Identity Protection 10.2 Implementing Entra Identity Protection 10.3 Planning & Implementing Conditional Access Policies 10.4 Managing MFA with Conditional Access
11 Defender XDR Posture, Incidents & Threat Intelligence
11.1 Security Exposure Management & Secure Score 11.2 Incidents, Alerts & Advanced Hunting 11.3 Reviewing Defender XDR Reports 11.4 Defender Threat Intelligence
12 Defender for Office 365: Policies, Alerts & Investigation
12.1 Threat Policies & Rules in Defender for Office 365 12.2 Configuring Alert Policies 12.3 Investigating & Responding to Email Threats
13 Attack Simulation & Restricted Entities
13.1 Managing Attack Simulations & Training 13.2 Managing Restricted Entities & Blocked Users
14 Defender for Endpoint
14.1 Onboarding Devices to Defender for Endpoint 14.2 Configuring Endpoint Settings 14.3 Defender Vulnerability Management Dashboard
15 Defender for Cloud Apps
15.1 Configuring the App Connector for Microsoft 365 15.2 Defender for Cloud Apps Policies & Alerts 15.3 Interpreting the Activity Log 15.4 Cloud App Discovery
16 Purview Information Protection & Data Lifecycle
16.1 Sensitive Information Types 16.2 Retention Labels & Policies 16.3 Sensitivity Labels & Policies 16.4 Monitoring Label Usage: Content & Activity Explorer
17 Purview Data Loss Prevention
17.1 DLP Policies for Microsoft 365 Workloads 17.2 Configuring Endpoint DLP 17.3 Reviewing & Responding to DLP Alerts, Events & Reports
18 Final Review & Exam Strategy
18.1 Exam-Day Strategy & Question Handling 18.2 Final Review Checklist & Next Steps
4.1 Monitoring Adoption & Usage
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
Microsoft 365 usage reports in the admin center cover active users and activity volumes for Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Yammer, and Microsoft 365 Apps, and can be exported for offline analysis
Microsoft 365 Adoption Score has two categories: People experiences (content collaboration, mobility, meetings, teamwork, communication) and Technology experiences (endpoint analytics, network connectivity, Microsoft 365 Apps health)
Adoption Score is computed from aggregated tenant-wide telemetry, never individual user-level tracking, and an admin can hide category-level details by role to protect privacy
Viewing usage reports requires at least the Reports Reader role; Global Admin and Global Reader also have access, and the Reports Reader role can be delegated without granting full tenant administration
Microsoft Viva Insights and the Microsoft 365 Adoption content (templates, success kits, Microsoft 365 Champions program) help admins turn usage telemetry into targeted training and change-management plans
Last updated: August 2026
Microsoft 365 isn't just a set of licenses you hand out — it's a platform you want people to actually use. The MS-102 exam expects you to know the two built-in telemetry surfaces a Microsoft 365 Administrator Expert uses to measure that usage: the Usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Microsoft 365 Adoption Score (formerly Productivity Score). Together they answer "who is doing what, in which workload, and is our technology stack healthy enough to support them?"
The Microsoft 365 admin center Usage reports
Open the Microsoft 365 admin center and go to Reports → Usage . The Usage dashboard gives you tenant-level activity for the core workloads:
- Report area What it measures
- Email activity Exchange active users, sent/received/read counts
- OneDrive activity Active users, files synced/shared, storage consumed
- SharePoint activity Site activity, file activity, active users
- Microsoft Teams activity Active users, channels, meetings, calls, chat messages
Viva Engage activity Active users, posts, reads, likes (this report was called Yammer activity before the product was renamed)
- Microsoft 365 Apps Activation counts, active installations, macro-enabled file use
- Browser usage Which browsers users connect to Microsoft 365 from
Each report lets you filter by the last 7, 30, 90, or 180 days , and each report has an Export option that downloads the underlying user-level rows as a CSV so you can build your own views in Excel or Power BI. The reports identify workloads that have been licensed but are underutilized — for example, 5,000 Teams licenses but only 800 active users in the last 30 days is a clear training opportunity.
Role requirements for usage reports
Not every admin should see every report. Microsoft 365 enforces least privilege:
Global Administrator — full access to all reports.
Global Reader — can read all reports but cannot change configuration.
Reports Reader — the dedicated role for delegated report consumers; can view the Usage dashboard and Adoption Score but cannot modify tenant settings.
Exchange / SharePoint / Teams communications / Teams service admin — each sees the reports scoped to their workload.
For MS-102, remember that Reports Reader is the right role when you want to grant a stakeholder (a department head, an adoption team member) report visibility without granting broader admin rights.
Microsoft 365 Adoption Score
The Microsoft 365 Adoption Score (in the admin center under Reports → Adoption Score ) is the successor to what Microsoft previously called Productivity Score. It provides insight into how the tenant is using Microsoft 365 and the health of the underlying technology experiences. It is split into two categories:
People experiences
People experiences measure how people work in five sub-categories:
Content collaboration — coauthoring in SharePoint and OneDrive.
Mobility — working across platforms and devices.
Meetings — Teams meeting habits, video on, follow-up.
Teamwork — Teams channels, shared workspace engagement.
Communication — email, chat, community posts.
The five categories roll up into a single tenant-level Adoption Score presented alongside a benchmark against organizations of a similar size. Treat the individual category contributions as relative signals — Microsoft tunes the scoring model over time, so do not memorise a per-category point value.
Technology experiences
Technology experiences measure the infrastructure that supports the work:
Endpoint analytics — device boot times, crash rates, managed device health (shared with Intune).
Network connectivity — the Microsoft 365 network connectivity score.
Microsoft 365 Apps health — how current the Office client is, add-in reliability.
How the score is computed and privacy
The Adoption Score is computed from aggregated, tenant-wide telemetry Microsoft already collects as the service provider. Microsoft publishes the following privacy commitments, and the exam has historically tested them:
No per-user tracking — the score is built from aggregated signals, not individual user activity.
No individual identification — you cannot drill from a score back to a named user.
Minimum reporting group size — categories are not displayed when the population is too small to anonymize.
Role-based visibility — admins can hide Adoption Score from users who should not see it.
Opt out — the tenant can opt out of contributing telemetry to the external benchmark, and can opt out of viewing Adoption Score entirely.
For the exam, the critical distinction is: Usage reports give you user-level rows (exportable CSV) for operational investigation; Adoption Score gives you a tenant-wide, privacy-protected score for executive reporting and adoption planning. They are complementary, not redundant.
Driving adoption from the data
The reports exist to drive action. A typical adoption workflow:
Identify an underused workload from the Usage dashboard (low active-user ratio against licensed count).
Cross-reference the Adoption Score to see whether the gap is a people problem (low collaboration score) or a technology problem (poor network connectivity, stale Office clients).
Target training using the Microsoft 365 Adoption content — Microsoft publishes success kits, onboarding templates, and the Microsoft 365 Champions program for exactly this scenario.
Use Microsoft Viva Insights (the former Workplace Analytics lineage) to surface organizational-level work patterns and measure whether the intervention moved the needle.
An admin who only reads the reports and never closes the loop with training is doing half the job. The MS-102 blueprint pairs "monitor adoption" with the implied next step of acting on what you monitored.
Exam tip: If a question asks which role is the minimum required to view usage reports without granting tenant administration, the answer is Reports Reader . If it asks which tool shows a 0-100 tenant-wide score built from aggregated telemetry with per-user privacy protections, that is Adoption Score , not the Usage reports.