What’s your DEM missing when all you have are native Microsoft tools?

If you want performance snapshots for the endpoints that access your organization’s Microsoft 365 and Teams solutions, Microsoft provides a good array of tools to do the job, including Call Quality Dashboard, Teams Admin, Teams Room Pro Dashboard and Service Health. 

But what happens at those endpoints is only a small part of your users’ digital experience. And managing that digital experience is an increasingly big accountability for most IT departments. 

So what are the gaps? What aren’t you seeing with native Microsoft tools that could be holding you back from true digital experience management (DEM)? 

#1 – The big picture

A whole lot goes on between your endpoints and the Microsoft data center, but native Microsoft tools really focus on those two parts of the environment. There’s a perfectly good reason for this: those are where Microsoft has direct interactions and influence.

But your organization’s Microsoft digital experience is affected by a whole range of factors that originate elsewhere — in your local network or your ISP’s network, for instance. And when you bring in premium solutions like Teams Rooms and Teams Phone, there are even more variables. 

Take Teams Rooms, for a start. You can monitor the performance of all authorized and properly configured devices using native Microsoft tools, but what about folks joining in from outside that space — or even outside your organization? Beyond the walls of the Teams Room, you drastically lose visibility.

With Teams Phone there’s a similar situation. Teams Phone needs a session border controller (SBC) to connect your network to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and unless Microsoft is hosting your SBC as a service, none of those performance-affecting regions are going to be visible. 

This means if there’s an issue with Teams and your only go-tos are native Microsoft tools, you have no way of tracing traffic paths all the way out to the data center to see where the problem originates. 

#2 – A proactive approach

Monitoring the digital experience is one thing. Managing it takes a whole other set of capabilities. It’s not just about reacting to what’s already happened; it’s about anticipating what might happen and preventing the worst. 

Synthetic testing is key to that kind of proactivity. Synthetic testing emulates user behaviors with automated bots — ‘kicking the tires’ of your Microsoft applications when no one is looking to detect any potential weak spots or latent issues. It’s basically a monitoring function, since it’s a way of ‘watching’ the environment from the background.  

When synthetic testing turns up an issue, you can be alerted and respond, so that by the time live users are actually using that same endpoint, Room, or network pathway, everything works exactly as it should.  

Native Microsoft tools weren’t built to support synthetic testing, so they only show you problems as they’re happening — in real time. With those tools alone, there’s no way for you and your team to get ahead of potential problems proactively. 

#3 – Accessible insights

For sure, the tools you get from Microsoft provide analytic insights — limited to what they can see — but you’ll need to hop between screens and dashboards to piece together what they’re showing you because their data is siloed. Even if you add other discrete monitoring tools to fill some of the visibility gaps, those aren’t going to be tailored to Microsoft 365 and Teams, and they’re also likely to be siloed themselves. 

It’s hard to draw out information of value when everything is segregated away. What’s needed is a way of consolidating the views and correlating the data to reveal trends and patterns and — most importantly — to get to the root causes of issues when they occur. 

Vantage DX bridges the gaps

Martello Vantage DX was designed specifically to augment native Microsoft tools and enable proactive DEM for Microsoft 365 and Teams. It provides a single-console view of the Microsoft IT environment from end to end, fully supports synthetic testing and a range of other monitoring functions, and correlates data across multiple sources to put actionable insights at your fingertips.