Say hello to one-click call quality and SBC data correlation for Teams Phone

For IT teams managing Teams Phone performance, the SBC is kind of a ‘last frontier’. Issues that occur there are hard to track down. Critical information slips out of view or can’t easily be associated with what users are experiencing.

Our latest update to Vantage DX closes the Microsoft Teams Phone SBC monitoring visibility gap with automated correlation of SBC records and Teams Phone quality data — the first solution in the industry to do so.

Is SBC performance really such a big deal?

The short answer is yes. Call quality can suffer dramatically if your SBC isn’t performing as it should. And without visibility into the SBC, there’s no way to identify the cause of issues — or solve them.

For example, a misconfigured or overloaded SBC can degrade calls by adding processing time to inspect and transcode voice packets. That extra time can cause latency, jitter or packet loss, resulting in choppy, echoey or delayed voice and video.

CPU-intensive transcoding can overtax an SBC, creating bottlenecks that cause calls to drop, fail to connect, or have poor audio quality. There’s also a risk of SIP signaling delays with SBCs, which can slow down call setups, prevent Teams Phones from joining Teams sessions or interfere with phone registration.

But wait, there’s more.

Issues related to encryption and decryption can arise when high volumes of protected traffic such as secure real-time transport protocol (SRTP) traffic or session initiation protocol (SIP) traffic are protected with transport layer security (TLS) and increase CPU loads. Again, this can add latency and affect call quality if the SBC hardware can’t keep up.

Finally, routing or policy misconfigurations can cause calls to loop, misdirect or fail entirely, while an improperly monitored SBC can suffer from high CPU/memory usage or dropped packets, degrading performance.

So, yeah, SBC performance matters.

What can’t you see with native tools?

The Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) doesn’t include any direct data on SBC performance. Any ‘visibility’ you have into SBC issues has to be inferred. For instance, the CQD will indicate when a PSTN call performs poorly. The issue could be in the SBC. You just have no way of knowing, unless you pull in direct monitoring data from the SBC itself, such as AudioCodes.

Another drawback of CQD is that it provides data on all Teams communications in all forms, not just Teams Phone, making it hard to isolate issues that originate with the SBC.

Vantage DX overcomes these challenges by isolating and unifying relevant Teams Phone call data and performance analytics to pinpoint the root causes of poor performance.

How Vantage DX does it differently

Vantage DX now correlates SBC call records and performance metrics with Microsoft Teams CQD data. With a single click, you can view correlated data all in one place. While Vantage DX has always provided SBC visibility, the extra step of automated correlation adds tremendous value.

Gone are the days of having to manually filter SBC data by time — separate from call quality metrics — and then manually compare and contrast the SBC metrics with CQD data to see where a problem lies. Vantage DX can display CQD data for any specified Teams Phone call along with AudioCodes call detail records (CDR) and performance metrics. If your SBC performance is poor for a call that the CQD also shows as performing poorly, it’s clear the SBC is implicated in the problem.

Get to root causes faster

With this new capability, your team can get clarity about root causes faster, minimize guesswork and manual effort, and speed up troubleshooting by eliminating the need to sift through multiple dashboards, logs and reports.

Automated correlation of SBC data also creates opportunities to automate notifications for specific SBCs based on associated call quality metrics, allowing you to track the performance of individual pieces of hardware.

All of this makes it easier to detect SBC problems and take pre-emptive action before they have a major impact on productivity and user satisfaction. That translates into fewer helpdesk tickets, better IT SLA compliance, and delivery of the kind of Teams Phone experience the organization expects — and is invested in.

Learn more about how Vantage DX can enhance your Teams Phone experience here.