Martello BLOG

How Streamlining ITSM Operations Can Reduce Service Remediation Costs

When using Microsoft 365 services the main benefit of having a monitoring tool that can assess performance quality and identify issues is that it sends alerts into a ticketing tool such as ServiceNow for example, to initiate the process of remediating the problem. When you don’t have a monitoring tool in place then support tickets aren’t automatically sent and users must identify issues and send in tickets manually with little to no information on where the problem came from. Without sufficient data on the Microsoft 365 service issue, the user is immediately challenged and must fight an uphill battle to both uncover and fix the problem. This blog will examine the importance of implementing the right monitoring tool to help streamline your organization’s ITSM operations and help reduce service remediation costs. 

Microsoft Limitations 

The Microsoft call quality dashboard is a useful tool that provides valuable information about Microsoft Teams voice data; however, it does not alert or integrates with other ITSM tools and processes. It also does not assess service tickets related to Teams’ issues, prioritize what those issues are, or send them to the appropriate teams for remediation. Microsoft does provide Microsoft 365 health alerts but they only pertain to issues that Microsoft may have. This is good information to have but there is only so much an organization can do when the problem is out of its control. The less data a user has regarding a Microsoft 365 service issue, the more difficult it is to properly identify and fix the problem. Most performance issues stem from the route to the Microsoft global network, and this is where ITSM has very little visibility without a proper Microsoft 365 monitoring tool. This is where Martello’s Vantage DX solution comes in. 

Martello Solution 

Martello’s solution not only helps identify service issues it helps provide meaningful data on the issue itself, specific to the workload and problem. There’s no need for a user to manually try to decipher what may be happening. Below we examine our solution’s process steps.    

• Detection – Our solution tests the Microsoft 365 service 24/7 and detects (in real-time) overall service degradation for Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads, and sends alerts directly to the ITSM tools. ITSM received alerts on the service before it impacts users. Alerts include details about the route to the cloud for incidents on Microsoft Teams, allowing ITSM to know where an issue is occurring and contact the owner directly. Our real user monitoring tool provides alerts on Teams’ service quality issues at the user level with group alerts (allows you to group your users based on specific criteria relevant to your needs). 
• Troubleshooting – Our digital experience monitoring robots are used 24/7 to qualify and prioritize any issue. The active network path monitoring tool helps to qualify latency issues by identifying who/what is responsible for creating it in the first place (internal, ISP, Microsoft, etc.) so the ITSM knows exactly who to contact to remedy the issue.  ITSM, Service Desk, and Helpdesk then know exactly which users are impacted by the service issue and can warn them or provide a workaround, limiting the impact to the business. 
• Improvement – Our single pane of glass correlates all Vantage DX alerts with existing monitoring tool alerts into service incident tickets synchronized with the ITSM, allowing you to see all active issues affecting the service. This reduces alert noise for ITSM, makes them more efficient, reduces MTTR for all Microsoft 365 services, and improves the productivity for your business lines and overall user satisfaction.  

With Martello, you can empower your organization’s ITSM to work more effectively with cloud services and streamline the overall experience for everyone involved. This proactive approach provides more specific data focused on the issues allowing for resources to be more efficiently used in remediation and less potential impact on your business. Learn more about how your business can gain the visibility needed to effectively isolate the source of Teams’ performance issues by downloading our Troubleshooting Microsoft 365 End-to-End eBook. 

Overcoming Information Barriers in Microsoft Teams

The phrase “Teams is slow” means that somewhere something isn’t working. But who in the organization should lead the charge to address the problem – especially when the problem isn’t Teams? This blog will examine the different information barriers in Microsoft Teams and how to overcome them.

Years ago, when IT life was simple, the resolution to a problem like “Word isn’t working” was obvious; either walk to or remotely connect to the endpoint, take a look at Word, perhaps reboot, reinstall, etc.  But today, when there’s a problem with a cloud service as complex as Teams, there can be a myriad of root causes that can exist literally anywhere along the path from the user’s endpoint device all the way to the Teams service – and anything that lies in between. These different information barriers in Microsoft Teams can cause performance challenges and be detrimental to business productivity.

This means isolating the problem and determining which part of your IT organization to call to fix the issue (assuming it’s not Teams that’s the problem) are going to be a challenge.  To make matters more difficult, larger IT organizations like yours function in silos; and that doesn’t help the process of determining where a service quality issue is with Teams.  For example, the following silos of IT could very well be the root cause of the “Teams is slow” problem:

• Endpoint Team – It could be a simple matter of a rogue process consuming all of an endpoint’s CPU utilization, causing Teams to appear to be responding slowly.
• Infrastructure Team – Users working remotely may be required to connect to the corporate network via VPN, forcing Teams traffic through the same path (despite Microsoft’s best practice guidance of having all Microsoft 365 traffic be routed directly to the Microsoft cloud).
• Networking Team – Once on the corporate network, there are potentially countless switches, routers, firewalls, proxies, and more that all can be misconfigured, malfunction, or just add so much latency that Teams is affected.
• Security Team – Microsoft recommends against putting any kind of SSL inspection, packet inspection, and data loss prevention solutions in between the user and Teams, as they can also add latency to the connection.
• Identity Team – The problem could be an authentication delay behind the scenes that those responsible for any federated identity need to take a look into.
• Development/Integration Team – what if the specific problem is with a Teams integration and has nothing to do with Teams at all?

Being able to effectively filter through these information barriers in Microsoft Teams allows your IT team to identify and remedy any issues that much faster. With all these potential hands in the proverbial Teams soup, it’s obvious that you either need to have each of these siloed IT teams working closely to solve one user’s Teams issue (yeah, right!) or you need a way to create end-to-end visibility across all the silos.

To accomplish this, the best approach is to take the responsibility of identifying the root cause completely away from any of the teams mentioned above and, instead, leverage solutions designed to create this visibility through detailed monitoring of the user experience, services, infrastructure, and network. This is how your business can best overcome information barriers in Microsoft Teams.

Using a variety of technologies including synthetic transactions, real user monitoring, active network path monitoring, and service-level monitoring, it’s possible to create a singular view that can be used to view the entire path from user to Teams, drilling down into the area responsible for the drop in Teams service quality. Once you’ve identified the source of the problem (e.g., it’s a malfunctioning switch in the corporate office), then you can notify the appropriate siloed IT team to fix the problem.