Martello BLOG : Microsoft 365 Monitoring

How Monitoring Microsoft Teams Service Quality

Benefits IT VIPs

The effects of remote work go beyond an employee trying to remain productive and stay connected to their team. The organization’s IT team must deal with a host of challenges that stem from trying to keep everyone effectively connected to a network when there are things such as different internet service providers and routing paths to contend with. Another challenge faced by IT is the influx of ‘poor call quality issues because of the varying internet connections, equipment setups, etc. Ultimately it is the business that suffers the consequences. Without the proper visibility, it becomes that much harder for IT to be proactive and be alerted of impending service quality degradation in real-time. This blog will examine how monitoring Microsoft Teams service quality with Martello helps provide IT VIPs proactive support for an enhanced Microsoft Teams performance. 

Microsoft Limitations 

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line; this statement applies to both the physical and digital world. Let’s focus on the digital part and what that means for telecommunications. When it comes to network architecture a direct connection to the internet source is the best way to ensure effective connectivity and service delivery. However, as cloud networks continue to be the option of choice for businesses for their ability to empower remote and hybrid work environments, the concept has evolved.  

According to Microsoft: “prior to the advent of cloud services such as Microsoft 365, end-user Internet connectivity as a design factor in network architecture was relatively simple. When Internet services and websites are distributed around the globe, latency between corporate egress points and any given destination endpoint is largely a function of geographical distance. In a traditional network architecture, all outbound Internet connections traverse the corporate network and egress from a central location. As Microsoft’s cloud offerings have matured, a distributed Internet-facing network architecture has become critical for supporting latency-sensitive cloud services.”  

Essentially Microsoft recommends a direct connection between the user and the Microsoft 365 cloud services for the most effective service. When this doesn’t occur, however, latency issues arise. The below image depicts the traditional network architecture that many enterprises have used/continue to use. Martello’s VP partnerships remarked in our ‘Managing Microsoft Teams Performance Anywhere, Anytime’ webinar last year that “most enterprise IT are still using this traditional architecture, despite a large acceleration in cloud adoption; remote offices using MPLS to connect to the datacenter, remote workers using a VPN to connect to the datacenter, and after the datacenter everything egresses to the internet and then finally Microsoft 365.” This extends the road from end-user to Microsoft 365 which increases latency and can invite potential service challenges into the fold.  

Microsoft offers recommendations to those using the traditional network architecture to optimize the connection to Microsoft 365 services which equates to shortening the distance between the end-user and Microsoft 365 through methods such as ‘split tunneling’ (when the VPN sends optimized traffic directly through the user’s local internet connection). While this helps improve the service connection, what about service quality? 

Since understanding the service quality of Microsoft 365 services – especially a communication tool like Microsoft Teams – and being notified of any service quality issues as/before they happen is imperative, this can be detrimental toward business productivity. Luckily, Martello is here to change that. 

Martello Solution 

Our digital experience monitoring provides a comprehensive solution to help ensure your IT team can effectively measure Microsoft Teams service quality and be alerted to signs of service degradation as early as possible. Here is how our solution can achieve that: 

Resolving poor Microsoft 365 service quality issues starts by first understanding where the issues stem from. 90% of performance issues that enterprises face with Microsoft 365 services are caused by the enterprises’ own network and infrastructure. This means that remedying the problem lies solely on the business. The Martello Gizmo solution helps IT gain a complete view of the Microsoft 365 service quality delivered to their business lines through 24/7 service quality dashboards that provide real-time and historical service performance data (with built-in SLA) for every major workload.

For Microsoft Teams performance specifically, being able to quickly identify and remedy the root cause of a performance issue is crucial to maintain effective service quality. By assessing the performance of a users’ route to the cloud you can effectively visualize the network path, any associated latency issues and receive real-time data (including RTT, Jitter, and packet loss) to better understand bottlenecks and optimize network performance.   

Our Active Network Path Monitoring tests the network paths between your users’ sites and Microsoft Teams services – site by site- and provides data to help ensure user productivity, satisfaction and improve the overall quality of service by: 

• Monitoring the network performance delivered to VIPs, Microsoft Teams rooms, office locations, and home/remote offices. 
• Monitoring the internet service providers network service quality 
• Monitoring the overall health of your route to the cloud 

Maintaining reliable Microsoft Teams performance requires visibility into the service quality; consistent testing of the networks, the performance of the users’ path to the cloud, and the ability to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly empower IT to ensure maximum productivity for the VIPs and their business lines. Learn more about how Martello’s DEM solution can help your IT team measure and optimize Microsoft Teams service quality for enhanced performance. Make sure to download our ultimate Microsoft Teams performance guide and register for our ‘Boosting Business Productivity by Taking Control of Microsoft Teams Performance’ webinar.