USE CASE
Full stack observability in the digital workplace
Take control and unlock a global viewpoint with local issue resolution
A Microsoft use case with VOSS Insights
Corporate organizations are fully invested in collaboration solutions that provide the foundation for dispersed workers to operate across sites, remotely, and in different regions. These solutions fuel productivity within the organization and facilitate external communication with partners, suppliers, and customers.
User expectations for collaboration solutions are high, and responsibility falls on the IT team to deliver, ensure everything operates as expected; both globally and locally.
The collaboration solution itself is multi-faceted. Increasingly, the core of the solution is unified around a single cloud platform such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex or Zoom, to provide calling, video, chat, meetings, and document sharing. In practice that core is always supplemented to make up the complete solution, including numerous other components within the corporate network, the Internet, and home networks for employees working remotely.
VOSS Full Stack Observability (FSO)
VOSS Full Stack Observability (FSO) can help you to meet the challenge to manage, monitor, and control your digital workplace, while ensuring that the entire collaboration solution continues to deliver the uninterrupted benefits it has promised.
What are the core principles of VOSS FSO?
- Deliver a dynamic single viewpoint across the whole UC network
- Analyze and improve user experience and adoption
- Track and measure service availability against agreed SLAs
- Significantly reduce time to identify and resolve problems
- Provide business analytics and information for action
- Reduce complexity, cost of ownership, and demand on resources
What challenges does VOSS FSO address?
- Tool sprawl – different teams using a multitude of different tools
- Diversity and complexity – multi-vendor, multi-component solutions
- Globalization – exposing the need for local monitoring for local issue resolution
- Reliance – critical IT systems raising the priority and visibility to get this right
- Move to the cloud – putting major parts of the solution seemingly ‘out-of-reach’
The true value of VOSS FSO
Single point of control
A single global view of performance and availability at a service level with the ability to drill into detail around specific components and locations.
Fast resolution of problems
Near real-time capture and correlation of data with alerting and classification to remove data noise and identify problem issues quickly. Includes a self-healing capability to automate corrective action in response to a failure condition.
Real-time dashboards
Clear dashboards to track, trend, and display service information, which is interpreted and displayed on selectable chart formats and in a common language, providing insight to drive action and improvement.
Comprehensive diagnostics
Details all aspects of UC, from a top level call down to specific items such as protocols, codecs, Wi-Fi, and headsets in use.
Proactive (synthetic) testing
Automated service testing across the corporate network, internet, and cloud applications, to patrol and test the digital experience and simulate user activity. And means you don’t have to wait for an issue to manifest itself.
Unifies fragmented data
Traditionally fragmented data from different components and in different formats are brought together into a single platform, where analytics can be applied to unlock data value and inform decision making.
Flexible ‘full stack’ cover
Complete flexibility to probe and capture data and alerting from multiple components in the collaboration stack: Multi-vendor, end -to-end, top-to-bottom, providing full visibility across the solution.
Regular reporting
Scheduled reports give insight into critical topics such as service availability and SLAs.
75% of the respondents agree that their CEO and business leadership understand that complete visibility and control over infrastructure, network, applications, security, and digital experience, is critical to digital business success. And with so much riding on the digital infrastructure, 47% of the respondents cite their average cost of an hour of downtime at $250,000 or more.
IDC white paper on Observability
May 2023
VOSS Insights with full stack observability
VOSS Insights optimizes collaboration environments by enhancing user experience, providing real-time monitoring and resolution, and empowering informed decision-making through comprehensive business analytics. These capabilities support organizations in improving digital experience and facilitating successful digital transformations. A central dashboard and reporting mechanism are supported by a flexible data acquisition engine that collects, correlates, and alerts on service conditions.
Sample dashboards
Maintaining control
The following screenshots are taken from VOSS Insights. They illustrate how your dashboards will enable you to track, trend, and display service information, providing actionable intelligence to drive improvement.
Microsoft experience overview dashboard
Tracking users across days of week on the VOSS Insights dashboard
Monitoring call quality on the VOSS Insights dashboard
Feature description
VOSS Full Stack Observability
| Single point of control to review service performance using dashboards | Visualize information on easy-to-understand dashboards, highlighting key information, trends, and points of note. Utilize various chart types (pie, column/bar, line/area, scatter, geo-map, heat-map, chord, funnel, gauge), color palettes, and tables for detailed information. |
| Drill down reporting to get to the detail | Start at the dashboard’s top level, then filter and drill into an office, department, or specific user to access more detail. View top level charts and summaries, down to individual usage records. |
| Alerting on service affecting conditions | Attach logic and rules to service conditions, driving the display of alerts on the dashboard, external notifications, and reporting into external (NOC) systems. |
| Adapt to your business requirements | Tune existing dashboards and reports with complete flexibility to suit specific business roles and requirements and create new dashboards and reports for specific needs. |
| Scheduled reporting to keep informed | Build and schedule reports for regular distribution and review. |
| Gather insight into user activity, experience, and call quality | Follow user activity across meetings, calling and chat, monitoring user experience, performance, and quality, and reporting on quality impacting factors such as jitter, latency, and packet loss. |
| Flexible data acquisition from a range of UC components | Collect, process, and consolidate data at scale from a variety of sources, on-premises and in the cloud, along with business logic, to present information on dashboards and reports, over user-selectable time periods, for review and action: Ancillary data from file input, SQL data sources, log files. |
| Track the status and health of critical UC components | Use various probes to monitor and check the health of critical UC components, such as collecting performance data from infrastructure devices, meeting rooms, and critical servers hosting applications. |
| Measure site by site network performance in response to sensitive voice and video traffic | Collect information from key components in corporate networks, alerting on packet discard, bitrate, and QoS configuration issues, to assist in identifying and resolving issues early with UC traffic. Drill down into individual sites and specific problem areas. |
| Proactively monitor cloud applications and resources | Use synthetic automated testing to proactively monitor cloud applications, including Microsoft 365 and Teams, simulating user experience, and reporting back on dashboards. Tests illustrate hop by hop paths, latency, jitter, and packet loss, providing visibility into pathways across the Internet and into cloud applications. |
| Fast track and automate the resolution of issues | Create automated processes, ranging from alerting, collecting additional data, and performing troubleshooting, to taking steps to resolve an issue automatically. Once an issue is identified or a known data pattern is flagged, initiate automated remedial action to resolve the issue swiftly. |
| Control access | Use defined roles and permissions to control access to dashboards and features, aligning access to specific administrator personas. |
| Flexible deployment options |
The VOSS suite
VOSS offers a range of services and capabilities that automate workflows, speed up service delivery, lower costs, and generate benefits faster. With a global customer base of large enterprise and service provider customers. More than 10 million devices have been migrated and are being managed and monitored by VOSS.
VOSS Migrate
Using a revolutionary methodology, VOSS Migrate streamlines UC migration projects by automating the discovery, extraction, transformation, validation, and loading of large volumes of data. This saves organizations from the complexities and risks associated with manual UC migrations, ensuring faster and more cost-effective transitions.
VOSS Automate
Offering a wide range of UC management capabilities, VOSS Automate provides a unified point of control across the digital workplace. Seamlessly integrating with UC business applications, it allows for highly customizable workflows, enabling companies to lower operating costs and adapt to evolving business needs with unparalleled automation agility.
VOSS Insights
Complementing VOSS Automate, VOSS Insights enriches the data required for monitoring and fault detection, leveraging self- healing AI logic to expedite issue resolution. By providing deep insights into the UC platform, VOSS empowers companies to continuously improve and optimize their UC environment, delivering exceptional communication experiences for employees and driving business growth as a result.
VOSS Project Services
The focus of our services team is not on the products themselves, but rather on helping our customers design, deploy and manage their specific digital workplace challenges that are being faced.
