90% of Teams Performance Issues are *NOT* Microsoft Related – Get Network Monitoring

With the recent announcement of 145 million daily active users for Microsoft Teams it’s not surprising to hear call quality troubleshooting, and Teams performance issues are top of mind for everyone.  When Microsoft has an outage it makes the news and it’s a big deal, but not all issues are Microsoft related and even that it often takes Microsoft 30 minutes to scope the issue and do their own root cause analysis.  With the recent push for flexible work schedules, increased working from home, from literally anywhere the emphasis and need for IT to quickly address quality issues has never been more important, but also never been more complex.  According to Call Quality Data millions of signals from Teams users, “90% of Teams performance issues are NOT Microsoft related.”  In fact, most happen with the client machine including CPU, Memory, and at home or with the local internet service provider. 

When troubleshooting Teams support issues, don’t jump to conclusions.  It’s important to break down the data and look closely into the 4Ws… 

When Every Minute Counts:  (Who, What, When, Where, Why, Which and How?) 

When tickets start to come in, you need to quickly qualify the issue to determine the best course of action.  

Who are the users impacted?

What workloads are affected?

When did it start?

Where are the bottlenecks?

Why did this outage occur?

Which team is responsible?

How are the lines of business affected?

It typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour for Microsoft to send a notification to its users indicating that there is an outage occurring. So, what do you do during this time? Will your entire company wait for a confirmation tweet from Microsoft before taking any action? 

Martello’s DEM Solutions for Microsoft 365 Can Help 

Martello’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution for Microsoft 365 helps organizations to qualify any service issues they have in minutes, allowing them to identify where the problem comes from, what is affected, where, and who is really experiencing its effects.

Martello gathers data from your existing monitoring tool and correlates them into a Microsoft service delivery map to quickly pinpoint the root cause of the issue.  

These are key Metrics Microsoft Teams Metrics:

From a general point of view, to reach these targets you should make sure that:

• The latency one-way is stable during busy and non-busy hours
• The latency RTT is stable and stays close to twice the latency one way
• Packet loss are not increasing too much during busy hours (it is normal if it rises)
• Jitter does not increase too much as well
• Edge connection tests stay better than client connections ones

Being able to quickly determine if home LAN or egress including local network components, your VPN, as well as ISPs are to blame is beyond what most IT organizations have access to, otherwise they are blind in a situation like this waiting for complete Call Quality Dashboard reports that often miss individual call quality data impact on the client itself.  

Lay the Foundation  

Martello DEM has just helped you to considerably reduce the impact of the Microsoft outage by allowing you to identify, qualify, understand and take decisive actions before any official announcement of the problem.

As the problem is solved, Martello shows you in real-time that the performance is improving, and you know again beforehand that the service is about to be restored.

Martello provides the following:

• Martello tests the service on a 24/7 basis, alerting you as soon as performance degradation is experienced with its robots which are running in each of your critical locations.
• Martello often gives you advance notice of detected outages prior to the Microsoft notification being issued. Every second counts.
• Martello tells you which workloads and which features of the service are unavailable or degraded and in which location.
• Martello gathers data from your existing monitoring tool and correlates them into a Microsoft service delivery map to quickly pinpoint the root cause of the issue.  
• Martello lets you go further and check your infrastructure to identify if there are any additional issues.
• With Martello, you can quickly identify which users are being affected by the outage in each of the locations you have selected.  

Don’t wait for the next outage to start laying the foundation for an exceptional Microsoft user experience. The time to act is now.  

Want to improve your monitoring? Start with looking at this Microsoft Teams performance guide that describes the 8 metrics you need to be measuring. It also outlines Microsoft’s best practices and more “actionable nuggets” from Martello dashboards so you can improve your Teams user experience. Martello helps you identifying where the problem comes from, what is affected, where, and who is really experiencing its effects.

>> Download the Teams Performance Guide for Troubleshooting & Optimization <<