BRK2010: Call quality management for Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams
Published Sep 27 2017 05:44 AM 7,530 Views

Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams helps you transcend geographical boundaries by connecting you to people in other locations. To succeed within an organization, you need to make sure calls get connected properly and call quality is good. What constitutes good call quality? This is highly subjective, but packet loss, jitter and latency are key network metrics you can measure. By understanding that signaling and media can take different paths, you can make sure that media has an optimal path between the sender and receiver in 1-to-1 calls and conferences. This is where call quality may get difficult to understand and master, luckily there are several tools available that we can work with such as The Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and Call Analytics.

 

William starts off the session by emphasizing three key takeaways from the session

  1. Both tools work with Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online
  2. Use Call Analytics for help desk and to look in to individual users calls and Call Quality Dashboard for groups of calls
  3. Both need your subnet to location data to locate the users

 

Troy talked about when working with call quality you can have a proactive approach and a reactive approach. Proactive is when you take steps to ensure and plan for your employees are getting a high-quality experience when they are on your corporate network. Reactive is when you respond to users report poor quality or you discover it through the tools. Beside from CQD and Call Analytics you can use the network assessment tool to measure quality from client network to Office 365. William went through the Call Quality Management tool overview

 

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 William also shared a breakdown of which tool to use for which persona

 

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Troy went through the story and a demo of call analytics, I recommend watching the recording to for the full story and demo, absolutely worth a watch. Here are some highlights

  • Call Analytics shows all information of calls within 15 minutes of the call ending
    • Data is organized in to device, system, connection, network
  • Call Analytics first gets useful when you import subnet mapping, because only then calls in your corporate environment gets classified as internal
    • You can use the same subnet mapping as for CQD
    • You can tell if users are on home network or corporate network
  • You can delegate access to tier 1, tier 2, and admin
    • Tier 1 cannot see usernames and advanced and debugging tabs are hidden
      • That is good so that tier 1 won’t get too much information about calls
    • Tier 2 sees all
    • Admin sees all and can update subnet mapping

 

Troy announced that Call Analytics will contain Microsoft Teams data by the end of October with general availability end of this year. If it is a Teams meeting it will indicate it is a Teams meeting by using the correct logo the Call Analytics individual call view

 

William talked about the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and that it now supports calls from Microsoft Teams. That is good news! He again emphasized that without subnet data all call will get marked as external, so make sure you upload subnet data when you want to succeed with both tools. He had a good summary what CQD is

 

  • Single page dashboard that provides at a glance view monthly and daily trends for call quality
  • Detailed customizable reports with in-place live report editing
  • Integrates tenant subnet to building data to provide location based insights
  • 270 dimensions over 121 measures of call quality and reliability for audio, video and application sharing
  • Includes end user ratings of calls
  • Service is hosted in Azure region based on your where your tenant is homed (NOAM, EMEA, APAC)
  • Currently only accessible by Skype for Business Tenant Admin role, work is being done to be able to give access to CQD without being a Tenant Admin.
  • CQD has 6 months of historical data
  • Subnet data takes 12 hours to agregate

 

William shared that CQD will support Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online calls and you can sort by product, both, only Skype for Business or only Microsoft Teams

 

William talked about how to import subnet mapping, dimensions, measures and key concepts in CQD. It is important to note that the streams you see in CQD are unidirectional, which means there are at least two streams per call. Unclassified calls are calls with not enough data to display quality correct. Typically, short calls are a big part of this list. Watch the recording for the full walkthrough and demo. CQD is to look proactively at trends within your infrastructure so you can act on it instead of having individual users call in and open support tickets.

 

There is a lot of training available for how to get started and how to create custom reports for CQD at http://aka.ms/MyAdvisor, which is formerly known as Skype Operations Framework

 

William closed off the session by mentioning that you can get user data from PowerShell with the Get-CsUserSession which only reflects Skype for Business data at the moment. The cmdlet helps you get call analytics data programmatically. He also mentioned The Network Assessment tool which verifies packet loss, jitter and latency and will support Microsoft Teams measuring as well at the end of October.

 

At the end they shared some useful links to get started and are great resources to revert back to when you want to succeed with call quality in Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online in your corporate environment

 

 

I enjoyed the session and recommend watching the recording when it comes available for full demo's at Microsoft Ignite On-Demand: https://ondemand.myignite.microsoft.com/videos

 

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‎Sep 27 2017 05:50 AM
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