How to Get Ahead of Microsoft Teams Issues

The old saying that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” has never been truer for IT teams. Many analysts say proactive IT management is long overdue, and in domains such as cybersecurity and e-commerce, the push is on to detect and stop potential issues early instead of troubleshooting after the fact.  

So why are so many IT groups stuck in reactive mode when it comes to managing business-critical communication and collaboration applications like Microsoft Teams? It’s an important question considering that organizations around the world—in virtually every industry—depend on productivity and collaboration tools to drive progress on internal projects and facilitate interactions with clients and partners.  

When users complain, it’s already too late 

A big part of the distinction between reactive and proactive approaches is how problems come to light. A Martello survey of 200 U.S.-based organizations in winter 2024 found that more than half (58%) of the IT groups responsible for Microsoft Teams performance depended on user tickets or help desk complaints to know when issues were occurring. 

Beyond putting IT in a catchup position, relying on user complaints introduces no small share of risk, since Martello research shows that just 13% of Microsoft Teams users even bother to report poor performance or subpar experiences. That means many organizations may be missing a significant proportion of business-affecting problems. 

Proactivity demands visibility 

To be clear, it’s not that IT groups are blasé about Teams issues or don’t take them seriously. Most lean on user tickets and help desk calls because they have little visibility otherwise. Native Microsoft tools allow for logging of application performance in the data center and at the user end of the session, but network paths can’t be traced and synthetic testing data and many valuable analytics are unavailable.

That might be OK if the data center and user endpoints were the only places issues occur, but most (62%) of Teams issues actually originate in the local network. 

This is why end-to-end visibility is one of three essential capabilities identified in the Martello Microsoft Teams Maturity Model as setting best-in-class Industry Leaders apart from other organizations, most of which (95%) are either Falling Behind or Catching Up. Without such visibility, essential insights are lost — preventing technicians from getting to the root causes of many issues. 

Unwavering attention 

Once an organization has end-to-end visibility of its full Microsoft Teams environment, IT can manage performance proactively. Obviously, doing so continuously—with the entire ecosystem in view—is beyond the capacity of a handful of technicians, so the second essential ingredient for Teams maturity is automated data acquisition and correlation.  

Automating acquisition makes it possible to draw data from all relevant elements simultaneously and on an ongoing basis. Issues can be identified and pinpointed rapidly, and steps can be taken to mitigate them. For example, if poor bandwidth in an office network is affecting Teams performance for a specific group of users, IT can intervene to fix the problem so other workers at the same site aren’t similarly affected. 

The correlation piece is a critical complement because it surfaces patterns that might otherwise be missed. Those patterns can provide forewarning of potential issues, giving IT the chance to take action before users are affected.

User-free experience testing

The third ‘must have’ capability to be truly proactive is synthetic testing, which is a way of ‘poking’ the system to ensure all components are working as they should. Martello brings a unique approach to this by deploying bots with real Microsoft Teams licenses to simulate the end-to-end process of setting up, connecting to, running and concluding Teams calls. This provides a truer picture of Teams performance and experience than other types of tests that rely on generic network traffic.

Running synthetic tests on an ongoing basis lets IT teams pinpoint potential trouble spots and take remedial steps long before any human users are involved.

Maturity and proactivity go hand in hand

With end-to-end visibility, automated data acquisition and correlation, and synthetic testing, IT groups can catch up to the proactivity trend and treat Microsoft Teams collaboration with the same seriousness they do other business-critical applications.

Increasing overall Teams maturity in these ways benefits both users and the business as a whole by providing a better, more productive experience. At the same time, it makes the daily work of IT groups easier by lifting them out of firefighting mode into a position where they can be ahead of issues and deliver their full value to the organization.

If you are ready to take the steps to improve book a quick call with us today and we can help.