PowerBI

You are the IT director, responsible for the IT stack and Microsoft Teams, and providing calling, collaboration, and meetings for your many employees who work flexibly from different locations and in different time zones. You’re in the hot seat and charged with service availability, quality, and user experience. There’s an issue; that ticket is back on your desk … some types of tickets come back faster than others, especially when a VIP is involved.

The good news is that Microsoft provides a toolset to help. There’s a range of usage reports available in the Teams Admin Center – 18 reports at the last count – that explain various topics. For most organizations, these pre-canned reports are a good start, but fall short in providing proactive and actionable information for IT managers running critical collaboration services.

There’s also a set of pre-canned reports on the Microsoft call quality dashboard (CQD), another portal that specifically addresses the topic of call and meeting quality, at an organization-wide level. However, Microsoft has effectively deprecated CQD in favor of Microsoft PowerBI.

Microsoft PowerBI is the ultimate option, but you’ll need technical expertise at hand to set-up, customize, and then support it. PowerBI takes CQD data and represents it on dashboards that can be filtered, searched, and drilled into, and covers most of the bases for call analytics. There’s a suitable template, the quality of experience report (QER), that can be used to get started.

At VOSS, we recommend a third option. How about investing in combined analytics and monitoring tools? UC monitoring can be supplied, ready-to-go from the cloud, to provide you with a proactive and robust way to overarch your Microsoft Teams collaboration service and improve your employees digital experience:

• A single portal with an end-to-end view (multi-vendor/multi-component)
• Dashboard flexibility – to align with specific business needs and metrics
• A proactive approach to service monitoring[A3] [A4] , testing and alerting – that includes synthetic testing alongside more traditional monitoring techniques
• Data flexibility – in terms of what is collected and how it is presented

A single portal with an end-to-end view (multi-vendor/multi-component)

VOSS enables organizations to quickly view service availability and quality across the entire estate covering Microsoft Teams, along with the supporting infrastructure, the service provider, perhaps older legacy systems (PBX), and any meeting rooms. A key strength is that this is visible all in one place, through a single portal, with information displayed on intuitive dashboards, each in the same format and nomenclature, with the ability to drill down into the detail. Essentially, it’s information made simple and ready for action.

Dashboard flexibility – Align with specific business needs and metrics

VOSS offers a complete set of dashboards for Microsoft Teams, out of the box, and ready to go. From here, you have the option to easily configure and adapt these to your specific business requirements, or to create new dashboards, intuitively and without a lot of technical expertise, from the VOSS Insights portal. Then, you can schedule circulation of these dashboards to stakeholders to easily report on service performance.

A proactive approach to service monitoring, testing, and alerting

Typically this aspect of monitoring is a dashboard based on call data – typically an overload of red, amber, and green flags, complemented by trending charts over an extended period of time. That’s a start but at VOSS we’d recommend building on this to provide a much more holistic view that includes:

• Enriching the data with information such as location information, identities of critical groups or individuals, or vital services, to provide more meaningful information that can lead to improvement activity.
• Adding synthetic test agents at important locations and with important users, that can simulate user activity and traffic, to continually validate service performance, identifying issues early before they become problematic.
• Capturing data from Microsoft Teams and supporting applications (such as critical Windows services, call recording servers) and infrastructure (such as networking components and SBCs), to provide a more rounded 360 view of service performance and issues.
• Configuring comprehensive procedures to respond to conditions, rating alerts, notifying, alarming, or raising tickets, and in certain conditions, automating response procedures to ensure a fast recovery or switchover to a backup service.

Data flexibility – What is collected and how is it presented?

Don’t be restricted by the data you can or can’t collect within Microsoft. You’ll need to pull call quality data from Microsoft on the API, but with VOSS, we also bring other sources of information into the view, such as: syslog, SNMP, HTTP, NetFlow, probes, and database queries, for example. It’s only when you have immediate access to all of this data from a single point of control that you get the full picture.

For more information

If you would like more information on how UC monitoring can give you a proactive approach to improving service availability and call quality for users, then follow this link, or you can also get in touch with us here for more detail or a demo.