Teams and Skype Jitter and Call Quality Monitoring from Office365Mon

Today we are announcing a new set of features for monitoring Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business call quality at Office365Mon.Com.  This package of features is now included with our Distributed Probe and Diagnostics agent, which we allow you to install in as many different geographic locations as you like.  The agent now has new features that will monitor call quality metrics for things like:

• Jitter
• Packet loss
• Packet reorder ratio
• Round trip time latency
• Calling firewall issues

As always with our agent, from each different location you can choose notification thresholds for these different call quality metrics, as you see here:

The notification values we start with are pre-configured for the minimum performance requirements recommended by Microsoft.  As always though, you can set up these notification thresholds on a location by location basis to match the network performance characteristics of each one of your different deployment areas.

In addition to performance monitoring, each time we do a check we also test network connectivity to a variety of calling service endpoints that Microsoft uses in the region your agent is deployed.  Each one of these endpoints is defined by an IP address, port and protocol that your Teams and Skype clients may need to access.  We test every one of these to ensure that there aren’t any network configuration issues that could block you from making calls from a particular location, as well as to be able to alert you when a service endpoint is unavailable.  This can also help you identify potential issues when users are unable to make or sustain calls with the Teams or Skype clients.

Once you turn on call quality monitoring, we’ll feed the data we collect from our testing back to your Office365Mon subscription, so you can dig into reporting data later on to see what the call quality metrics are like across the different locations where you’ve installed the agent.  For example, here’s what the jitter looks like from two different locations:

Here’s what the packet loss looks like from those same locations:

And finally, here’s what the round trip time latency looks like:

Each of the preceding three charts shows you data from recent tests – meaning in the last couple of hours or so – but we also roll up this data by day as well as month.  That means you always have a current, short term and long term view of the call quality at your different office locations.

For firewall issues, we keep a log of each time we encounter issues reaching a particular IP address, port and protocol.  So in addition to the notifications you get, you’ll also see a history of those issues, as shown here:

All of the data is sortable so you can see where you’re having the most problems by location, address, port, or protocol type.

 

Another Feature Based on Your Feedback

The Call Quality monitoring feature from Office365Mon is yet another example of where your feedback to our team has resulted in new and enhanced capabilities.  We’re always interested in what you think about our service – good and bad – and ideas and suggestions you may have for ways in which we can do a better job of helping you Stay In the Know, and Stay In Control.  Call Quality monitoring is available for customers with our Enterprise Platinum license.  You can find out more about our licenses and features by viewing our product matrix at https://www.office365mon.com/Products/Pricing.  In addition, if you don’t have an Office365Mon subscription for Office 365 monitoring yet, you can get a free 90-day trial of our Enterprise Platinum license by visiting us at https://office365mon.com.  I hope you’ll consider taking a few minutes to download and install our latest agent and try out the Call Quality monitoring feature, along with all of the many other features available from Office365Mon.Com.

From Sunny Phoenix,
Steve