Martello BLOG

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.

Proactive Microsoft 365 & Microsoft Teams Service Delivery Monitoring for Enterprise IT & MSPs

Providing an effective service – especially in a world with constantly evolving needs – goes beyond standard operating hours. Imagine if a bank only kept your investments secure while they were ‘open’ during their hours of standard operation? Issues can arise at any time and having effective service delivery monitoring and support for enterprise’s IT teams and managed service providers is critical. This blog will examine how Martello’s solution provides proactive Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams service delivery monitoring and support to help maintain the productivity of your organization. 

Microsoft Service Limitations 

While Microsoft’s Call Quality Dashboard is useful for providing data about user’s functionality, it only provides this information when users are actually using Microsoft Teams and is limited to calls only. The Microsoft Connectivity tool offers valuable network path data but is unable to alert and/or correlate data to determine the root cause of potential issues and synchronize that data with the ITSM. In short, Microsoft can provide key parts of the data puzzle but extra visibility would only serve to equip the organization with more data to make better proactive choices to support the service delivery for your business. This is where Martello’s solution comes in. 

Martello Solution 

Taking a proactive approach is the best way to mitigate the effect of issues if/when they occur. Martello’s DEM solution offers proactive monitoring 24/7 across all Microsoft Teams features and other Microsoft 365 workloads. 

Detection 

• When you are responsible for a large organization the impact of any issue can be far-reaching and affect many. Our solution helps you to identify Microsoft Teams service issues, and the rest of Microsoft 365’s workload before it becomes a larger problem for your business and/or customers through 24/7 testing. We pinpoint where the problem is and what is responsible for causing it in the first place.  

Troubleshooting 

• When the issue and its origin have been clearly identified our Martello solution then can begin the process of troubleshooting. Our tools can detect how the issue is affecting each user and provides data on specific elements of the problem such as any latency in the route to the cloud. By using our collected data, we can effectively reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) for every Microsoft Teams network performance issue.  

Improvement 

• By correlating all of the gathered data into a single pane of glass we can provide a clear simplified view of the user’s Microsoft Teams service performance and provide all necessary information to the service desk and help desk teams to improve overall efficiency, limit the business impact and proactively support end-users with Microsoft Teams services.  

What helps Martello’s users stand apart from the competition? Clear visibility of the service delivery and performance of Microsoft Teams’ for the specified user(s) and other Microsoft 365 workloads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you’re only finding out about an issue that affects your Teams’ call quality after you’ve made an important call your business has already been negatively impacted. For MSPs, being able to proactively remediate an issue before it affects your end-users is critical. But it’s never too late to improve your visibility and monitor your Microsoft 365 service performance to ensure the best quality possible. Learn more about our Microsoft Teams monitoring solution and download our Teams performance cheat sheet here.  

Why Teams Performance Monitoring is More Than Just Measuring Uptime

Written by Nick Cavalancia, Microsoft Cloud & Datacenter MVP

When your organization’s very ability to share, collaborate and meet depends on Microsoft Teams performing, solely watching Teams service availability simply isn’t enough. Employees operate on the assumption that every bit of technology they rely on just works.  Teams is the modern example of the most critical application to businesses today, with over 145 million daily active users. But even though it is part of the Microsoft 365 platform, it still represents a technology solution internal IT teams are responsible for. And that presents a huge problem. Effective Microsoft Teams performance monitoring is necessary.

Take the example of a customer of ours whose headquarters is in the downtown of a major U.S. city and has 7 floors of nothing but meeting rooms, with IT located in the basement. The only time IT even knew there was an issue with Teams was when the employee tried to use Teams unsuccessfully at the meeting time. That’s never a great experience for the user or IT.

The challenge is for each meeting room, there were so many factors that could the reason for a Teams performance issue: it could be the meeting room computer, the network switch, the cabling, an issue with network routing, authentication issues, and all the services Teams relies on including Azure AD, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and more.

Internal IT teams traditionally only have visibility into the overall status of the Teams service; there’s the Microsoft 365 Service health status site and the Microsoft 365 Status account on Twitter.  But all those do is measure one metric – uptime – of a very multi-faceted scenario where literally anything technically sitting between the meeting room computer and Teams can be the problem.

For those organizations heavily relying on Teams, the goal is not just for it to function, but to perform well – and that includes meetings, collaboration, chatting, integrations, access to files, and more. So, it’s necessary to look beyond just the uptime of the Teams service and look for ways to get deeper visibility into what parts of the path from endpoint to Teams may be causing the problem.

Today, there are a number of monitoring technologies available that can assist in both provide the needed visibility and help to isolate the root cause of not just outage issues, but even Teams performance issues. These include:

• Synthetic Transaction Monitoring – Mimicking user requests, a robot agent interacts with Teams in the same way users do, reporting back metrics on whether it was able to perform actions like scheduling a meeting, upload a file, start a call, and more. By placing these bots strategically, you can represent entire geos, office locations, floors, subnets, wireless/wired network connections, and more. This kind of monitoring helps to identify issues with service quality, providing detail on scope, location, and impact.
• Real User Monitoring – Using an agent on a specific user’s endpoint, this method focuses on the user’s interaction with specific Microsoft 365 services and reports back on the quality of service provided therein. This kind of monitoring helps to identify if a specific user (e.g., the meeting rooms mentioned above) is having issues.
• Service Monitoring – This kind of monitoring collects, consolidates, correlates, and analyzes both Microsoft 365 services, as well as your organization’s internal infrastructure to ensure proper end-to-end service delivery, providing insight into the root causes of issues, whether it’s a Microsoft 365 service, an internal switch, or anything in between.

Monitoring Teams for performance reasons requires much more focus on two factors:  first, whether your users are experiencing a Teams issue, and second, what is causing the issue. While there’s little you can do when problems occur on the Microsoft side of thing (other than to inform your users of the problem), having visibility into everything else used to get the user connected to Teams opens up a whole range of possibilities around providing better – and more proactive – service delivery of Teams. Learn more about how to optimize Teams performance by downloading our ultimate Microsoft Teams performance guide here.