Monitoring Microsoft Teams Video Quality With Vyopta

It’s a scene that’s become easy to imagine in the new work-from-home world we’re living in. Mom and dad firmly attached to their laptops in an office or on the couch and trying to work and collaborate with their colleagues from a distance, while the kids are on their own devices and trying to complete their schoolwork virtually.

Instances like these are bound to be dependent on having the best video quality possible. And with the growing reliance on Microsoft products for companies big and small, it’s crucial to have the best Microsoft Teams video quality possible to ensure that group meetings are as free of glitches and interruptions as possible.

The good news is that it’s possible now to get the deepest, most detailed look ever at Microsoft Teams video quality using Vyopta’s analytics that provide the clearest look ever at usage and quality issues. If the mom from up above has a call that’s marred by either bad audio or video that cuts in and out, the IT staff behind her team will be able to identify if there’s a bandwidth or local network issue or an equipment problem that can be addressed with a replacement purchase.

It’s a level of insight that’s not previously been available to Microsoft Teams users using out-of-the-box administration capabilities.

“The average user doesn’t have the ability to go quickly into the admin center to see the video quality experience on the screen for a call. I don’t even know if most people realize what they are missing with the video data. Until you read it clearly all you can look at is audio quality,” said Jaiganesh Lakshmisundaram, Vyopta’s product manager.

“We go as deep as saying what is the Microsoft Teams video quality experience on a bad video stream and what’s the packet loss from both a source and target perspective on a call. We can give both of those metrics and metrics around the packet utilization rate, the bandwidth estimate, the received frame rate, and things around any network jitter or any specific frame loss rate percentage.”

Why Monitoring Microsoft Teams Video Quality Matters

The sudden growth of Microsoft Teams during the Covid-19 pandemic caused many users to embark on something of a crash course with the tool, which means that many high-volume users and system administrators might not know what they don’t know about it. While audio quality data has been somewhat easier to gather, there’s never been an easy and fast single-pane view to look at problem meetings and the issues behind them.

And with video capability representing a growing portion of the overall usage of Teams, it will be important for companies to be able to monitor video quality in a comprehensive and actionable way.

With MS Teams one of the things they couldn’t do without us is proactively make sure the experience is good because the other admin tools and options required a lot of digging into to trouble shoot issues since there was no way to know about issues while they are happening,” said Kamalina Czerniak, Vyopta’s senior manager of product marketing.

“That’s important since you have to manage Teams now at scale to keep up with the tremendous growth in usage. What we provide helps them be more proactive – soon will give alerts in real time.”

The advantages of great video experiences are becoming obvious as many workers are likely to remain remote for a long time to come. With video integrated into the Microsoft Teams environment along with chat, document sharing and other collaboration capabilities it is easy to see why more and more companies are turning to Teams as the preferred productivity option.

“By having your video performing really well there are so many intangible benefits in the sense that having a video conversation is more personal and makes Teams feel more real. So from the remote work standpoint in general there’s a higher efficiency and productivity for companies where video is part of the culture. With video you know when to jump in more by reading body language more.,” Czerniak said.

“In Vyopta they get dashboards to show what is a good call and not a good call and determine systemic issues or identify problem users so you can take corrective action before those users report anything. The tendency is not to report anything so to put this information into the IT team’s hands to let them fix things goes a long way in ensuring business productivity.”

Chad Swiatecki is a business writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, New York Daily News, Austin Business Journal, Austin American-Statesman and many other print and online publications. He lives in Austin, Texas and is a graduate of Michigan State University. Find him online on LinkedIn.