Since 2 days I'd been seeing this new option inside the ellipse drop down menu & I'd been scratching my head, asking myself, how long has this been lingering on there!?
Woke up today to the buzz in the Teams community already. Indeed no one was anticipating this little change.
This time Microsoft didn't drop any notification in the message center about the rollout and quietly pushed the feature out. Actually it isn't a feature, but more of a metric indicator.
How Does This Benefit Us ?
Let's first use this feature during live calls & see what all there is to offer.
So we can see in a meeting with where a presenter was sharing screen with me & two way audio was present, what sort of metrics Teams client provides us.
Note * - Sent Codec is marked Unknown, however it is the same one as received. AI Powered Satin.
Expanded the Audio metric & found a shortened version of the KPI's I was familiar with in the Skype for Business 2015 - CDRs (Backend reporting stored over SQL).
But those reports were generated after a little delay (5-15 minutes) after the conference/call had concluded. Then over the years we saw various UC monitoring tools which had SDN listeners installed on Front-End servers to capture the live traffic ingressing/egressing out of it and generate it on a dashboard whilst the call was in active running mode. But all that was from a Server admins point of view for reporting/troubleshooting.
With Call Health rolling out to Teams clients, an end-user has the ability to comprehend the network over which the call is progressing and the impact it is having on the call.
Of course, we aren't expecting the general population to turn into network experts to start understanding voice KPIs like Jitter, Round Trip Time, Packet Loss etc. But say, a user calls up their IT admin during a meeting & reports an issue in any Teams modality (say Screen Sharing), the IT admin can collect the call metrics of the end-user during the call itself & inform about the possible issues why the screen-sharing is lagging or say, the audio is choppy/robotic or with gaps in between. A remote user, probably on a home/hotel Wi-Fi might not even raise a ticket with the IT admins. Such issues anyways are out of scope for the managed services team as users are not on corporate LAN.
The end-user can rather be advised to switch over to another network, say cellular data (4G/5G)
Few KPIs
Average Jitter During Call: < 30ms during any 15s interval
Latency (RTT / Round trip time) < 100ms
Packet Loss < 1% during any 15s interval
So looking at my metrics from the screenshot above, my RTT is a bit bad (256 ms). At the time of capturing the screenshot, I was using 4G Hotspot to connect to the meeting & experienced no audio/screen sharing issues.
Comments