(Article originally posted on LinkedIn)

Microsoft Teams provides meeting and collaboration capabilities for 320 million monthly active users. Teams provides telephony services for over 20 million users, up almost 30% year-over-year.

Teams helps millions of business users be more efficient and effective, except when it doesn’t.

To be fair, many of the issues users have with Teams are not related to Teams. The overall user experience with Teams is impacted by the user’s laptop (memory, processor, other applications), the audio/video devices being used (certified vs non-certified), and the network (corporate and especially home WiFi/internet).

Teams is solid except when it “leaks”. When Teams leaks IT professionals are responsible for determining why and fixing the leak.

Old-fashioned techniques: Dowsing

So, how do you find the source of the leak? How do you find the problem?

Finding water has been associated with many methods over the years. Similarly detecting issues with Teams has a long history of techniques.

Dowsing to find water, often referred to as water witching or divining, is an ancient practice where individuals use a dowsing rod, typically a forked stick, to locate underground water sources.

The dowser holds the stick by its two prongs and walks over the land; when the stick dips, twitches, or exhibits any unusual behavior, it is believed to indicate the presence of water below. The method relies on the dowser’s sensitivity to environmental cues or unseen forces, which supposedly guide the movement of the rod. Despite its long history and anecdotal reports of success, dowsing lacks scientific validation and remains a controversial and largely unexplained phenomenon.

Some approaches to monitor and troubleshoot Teams can seem equally archaic as using a stick to find water.

As Teams has evolved from OCS, to Lync, to Skype for Business, some IT Pros continue to use tools that worked alright when voice and collaboration workloads were hosted on-prem but fail to provide visibility into the cloud-based, distributed environment of Teams.

New fashioned techniques: Full-stack Observability

Sure, you might get lucky and find water using a y-shaped stick.

You may also get lucky and be able to find the source of a Teams issue using the Teams Admin Center or other non-Teams specific network tools.

In both cases, you are relying on luck. The science for finding water and finding “leaks” or issues with Teams has improved greatly over the past several years.

Today, geophysicists may use surface magnetic resonance (SMR) imaging to scan the underground and map pockets of groundwater. SMR is a cost-effective, non-invasive, and powerful ground-based geophysical technique used to detect and measure groundwater compared to traditional drilling. Think of it as an x-ray for the ground.

Today, Teams administrators can use full-stack observability tools to cost-effectively identify the source of reported Teams issues and often pro-actively remediate potential issues before they become user impacting.

Full-stack observability enables the monitoring of every component in a distributed IT environment through telemetry data. It provides a real-time view of each component’s status, centralizing various outputs for a comprehensive perspective across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid setups. Full-stack observability allows for a complete understanding of system activities by analyzing the telemetry from all system parts. This becomes especially valuable as more workers operate in a hybrid mode, sometimes working from home and sometimes working in an office.

Unfortunately, both a pseudo-scientific dowsing stick and many Teams monitoring tools only look at the surface.

By monitoring all the solution parts, from the hardware up to the Teams application, a tool can provide insight into what component(s) caused an issue. Further, on-going synthetic transactions that simulate user activities can identify issues often before they have an end-impact impact.

This understanding is what led VOSS to expand its proven VOSS Insights toolset to provide full-stack monitoring.

The VOSS full-stack observability (FSO) solution seeks to:

• Offer a dynamic unified perspective across the entire UC network
• Analyze and enhance user experience and adoption rates
• Monitor and evaluate service availability in accordance with agreed SLAs
• Drastically reduce the time required to pinpoint and rectify issues
• Supply actionable business analytics and insights
• Streamline complexity, minimize ownership costs, and alleviate resource strain

VOSS Insights allows you to investigate telemetry from all the components that make up your UC Solution, even if you happen, like many large organizations, to use multiple UC platforms.

Upgrading Your Tools

With more users relying on Teams for both internal and external communications when they are in the office, working from home, or traveling, IT Pros who can proactively monitor and diagnose problems with Teams can find a “leak” before it becomes a “flood”, potentially overwhelming your support desk and eroding user confidence in Teams.

If you are still relying on monitoring and analytic tools from years ago, it’s time to toss your “dowsing stick” on the fire, roast some marshmallows, and then equip yourself and your team with modern and proven tools.