Troubleshoot Call Quality in Teams Fast

We Love Microsoft Teams, But We Hate Call Quality Troubleshooting!

Every IT admin has been in this fretful situation at least once. The solution or platform they support is broken and failing. They want to research what is causing the issue so they can get it fixed quickly.  But they need the detailed information to do the troubleshooting and find the root cause. There in lies the challenge when it comes to troubleshooting call quality issues for Teams. Getting to the root cause fast often means getting to the data otherwise you’ll end up pointing fingers saying… It’s not me.

Microsoft Teams has quickly surpassed all other enterprise tools to become the heartbeat of the enterprise.  Combining communication and collaboration in one tool puts all our energy and focus on a single tool to get work done. But what happens when calls start dropping for Executives, or meetings are garbled with audio that sounds like a robot voice?  Call quality is essential, and no one wants to wait around to hear excuses from IT. 

When Teams call quality gets jittery, fingers start getting pointed and you aren’t sure if it’s Microsoft, or the Network, the ISP, the client device?  You need answers FAST!

The folks at panagenda know this story well.  They have been helping customers quickly isolate and identify the issues with IT collaboration platforms for years.  And there are a lot of moving parts involved in the end-to-end voice traffic for Teams. Having full visibility into the complete experience from the user perspective is the key.  Any given hop could contain answers as to why you’re having call quality issues and having the accurate data to quickly pinpoints the smoking gun will help remediate the issue fast!

Some examples of issues that cause call quality problems …

1. Background Processes Running on Computers (chewing up CPU) – Long running processes can eat up valuable CPU on a client machine. Antivirus running on a machine can ultimately lock it up and without realizing it you’re on a call wondering why your boss sounds like a robot. It’s not like a cell phone where the CPU is more compartmentalized.
2. Too many Apps Open (Word, Excel, PPT) and web pages (chewing up available memory) – Many users often open too many programs and windows simply allows the users to reclaim the memory. Outlook, Word, Photoshop, it really doesn’t take much to get an older machine that may have other things installed and finding that the memory has run out and disk is paging. Client performance can quickly impact call quality in a big way. How many browser windows do you have open? Do you really need to close the browser? Don’t be surprised if you’ve got 100 tabs why the call may seem a bit scratchy and unclear.
3. Slow home networks with low upload speeds – Users have an expectation that their calls will be problem free… and they should. Unfortunately for the user at home, the streaming video at home, the large video downloading on your desktop, and that cloud backup that’s running are all running over your little home connection. Network performance often is impacted by ISP outages as well. Poorly configured gateway or bad routes causing unnecessary hops to get to the Microsoft 365 Front Door can absolutely impact performance in negative ways. Even drivers can prevent optimum usage. A recent update to cable modems such as Docsis 3.1 has increased speeds with updated drivers. Mismatched or outdated drivers can greatly impact download speeds.
4. Slow ISP’s with long peering distance to Microsoft Cloud – Internet service providers have their own DNS and routes. Often these routes are neglected or not necessarily optimized for the heavy usage of Microsoft 365 Online Services. In a corporates network setting it’s possible to manage routes and optimize hops, but this year has led to more work from home and network upgrades have not kept up. Bandwidth constraints, dropped packets increased jitter from so much more traffic has made important need for performance analysis and transparency. While some users may not have much to say about their ISP, others may find alternatives or monitoring solutions that can lead to optimization on home networks and gateways or equipment that can be updated or configured for optimization. The Microsoft Front Door can be optimized for the fastest route with the least hops and reduced line noise. We’ll show you how that’s possible.

I’m excited to announce an upcoming webinar hosted by panagenda where we will deep dive into troubleshooting Microsoft Teams Voice Call Quality.  We’ll also get a close look at their OfficeExpert End Point Monitoring solution and see how it makes troubleshooting fast and easy for IT support teams.

WHEN?  MAY 6TH, 2021 at 1PM (EDT) | 12PM (CDT) | 10AM (PDT)

>>Register now!

IT administration and support has shifted their focus over the past few years – USER experience is CRUCIAL. Enterprise organizations are looking for ways to improve usage and adoption for technologies at the heart of digital adoption, especially Microsoft Teams for calls and meetings. This has prompted IT support groups to find better methods to track and identify quality issues, especially for users working remotely.

Traditional network monitoring tools are optimized for data centers and centralized office locations where employees would access SaaS cloud applications from the corporate infrastructure. These tools no longer work in today’s enterprise landscape with many users working from home. Instead, enterprises need a holistic monitoring tool that provides end-to-end visibility into the employee experience, regardless of where they are working.

In this webinar, you will receive an introduction to OfficeExpert Endpoint Performance Monitoring (EPM). This new module provides data analytics for Microsoft 365 performance and availability from the end-user perspective. If you want to know the truth about your Teams call quality experience, then please join us to see how actionable insights can speed troubleshooting and help remediate issues before they become escalations from an executive.  

During the webinar demonstration you will explore topics that include: 

• Proactive monitoring for home office network performance
• Identify slow ISP’s causing poor call quality for remote users
• Detailed analytics for end-point computers (CPU, memory usage, patch levels, etc.)
• Fast troubleshooting for call quality issue resolution
• And more…  

Don’t miss the opportunity to take advantage of this timely information.

>> Register Now!<<

Attendees will be entered into a raffle for a chance to win a free Xbox One!