Case Study: Microsoft Corporation achieves real-time, scalable Office 365 insights and improved user experience with DataStax Enterprise

Improving the Office 365 experience for millions of customers with DataStax Enterprise (DSE) on Azure

Microsoft’s Customer Fabrics Platform team needed a way to understand Office 365 user behavior at massive scale—more than 85 million active users and 300+ TB of anonymized client and server logs made synthetic testing impractical. Their goal was to detect and resolve problems before customers noticed, reduce support tickets, and improve tenant and end-user experience across a global productivity platform.

They deployed DataStax Enterprise on Azure VMs (Ubuntu) with Kafka for ingestion and DSE’s Spark/Cassandra for near‑real‑time and batch analytics. A 40‑node pilot grew to 400+ nodes, handling ~400,000 writes/sec with 20–30 ms latency, enabling proactive outreach, fewer support calls, faster issue isolation, and automated cluster deployment via Azure Resource Manager and Chef—resulting in measurably better reliability and customer satisfaction.

Microsoft Corporation

Sean Usher

Senior Software Engineer, Customer Fabrics Platform