From my experience, a very small number of people actually choose PowerShell over the GUI (Graphical User Interface, ie. The Office 365 Portal). But once you get a grasp of PowerShell and write some scripts, you’ll see the light and going back to your old ways will be very hard. PowerShell has two big advantages. First, once you are proficient you’ll be able to pull and modify data much faster with PowerShell than going into the portal. Second, most managers aren’t PowerShell experts, so when you are working and have your PowerShell window open they will be extra impressed with you! Don’t worry, you can thank me later.
In this article I’m going to focus on using PowerShell to obtain message trace results from the past 48 hours. The commands in this article will work for date ranges up to seven days in the past. For messages older than seven days we need to run an extended message trace, or Start-HistoricalSearch.