 | While it does not happen very often, there are times where Teams Rooms participants experience one or more quality issues. These include choppy video, robotic audio, frozen content sharing, delayed join times, or rooms that seem unreliable only during busy periods. The good news is that poor call quality is usually diagnosable if IT admins follow a consistent method that is documented by Microsoft. In this blog post, we walk through 7 steps that admins should take to analyze and troubleshoot the root cause of these quality issues and prevent them from happening again. These tips are curated from both official documentation as well as real world experience. |
Microsoft’s current guidance points admins to three core capabilities for troubleshooting and improvement: the Teams admin center or Pro Management Portal for individual call analysis, Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) for organization-wide patterns, and Quality of Service (QoS) to prioritize real-time traffic on the network. The general approach is that Teams admins should use per-user and per-meeting analytics to isolate individual incidents, then use CQD to determine whether the issue is broader—such as a site, subnet, Wi-Fi, VPN, driver, or firewall problem. CQD also provides near-real-time records, typically available within 30 minutes after a call, which makes it suitable for operational troubleshooting rather than just long-term reporting.
Tip #1: Understand clearly the issue
When users report that “the meeting was bad,” the first step is to document what they actually experienced. Microsoft explicitly lists common symptoms such as voices breaking up, audio echoes and drops, cutting in and out, shared video choppy, freezing or pixelating, and failures in video or content quality under network congestion scenarios. Documenting the basics of the incident: the affected room, meeting link or call type, time/date/time zone of the most recent occurrence, whether the issue is recurring, whether the problem affected a single room or multiple rooms, and any visible error messages. Microsoft’s support guidance specifically recommends collecting those details up front, together with app version, device type, attached peripherals, and room account information, because that dramatically shortens root-cause analysis if escalation becomes necessary.
Tip #2: Use the right tool for the right layer of the problem
A common mistake is jumping straight into room hardware checks before looking at telemetry. It is advisable that the Teams admin center (for MTR Android) and Teams Pro Management Portal (for MTR Windows) should first be used for analyzing a specific call or meeting for a specific user or device, while CQD is best for identifying trends across the organization or a location. In practice, that means if one executive briefing room had a bad meeting yesterday, start in the Teams admin center or Pro Management Portal. If three rooms in the same office are having intermittent issues during the same time window, move quickly to CQD and look for a site or network pattern. For MTR Windows, selecting the specific room from the Rooms tab on the left panel, then selecting Call history provides a list of calls that have taken place. Admins can then drill down to the specific call having experiencing issues to see a detailed analysis as shown below:
Tip #1: Understand clearly the issue
When users report that “the meeting was bad,” the first step is to document what they actually experienced. Microsoft explicitly lists common symptoms such as voices breaking up, audio echoes and drops, cutting in and out, shared video choppy, freezing or pixelating, and failures in video or content quality under network congestion scenarios. Documenting the basics of the incident: the affected room, meeting link or call type, time/date/time zone of the most recent occurrence, whether the issue is recurring, whether the problem affected a single room or multiple rooms, and any visible error messages. Microsoft’s support guidance specifically recommends collecting those details up front, together with app version, device type, attached peripherals, and room account information, because that dramatically shortens root-cause analysis if escalation becomes necessary.
Tip #2: Use the right tool for the right layer of the problem
A common mistake is jumping straight into room hardware checks before looking at telemetry. It is advisable that the Teams admin center (for MTR Android) and Teams Pro Management Portal (for MTR Windows) should first be used for analyzing a specific call or meeting for a specific user or device, while CQD is best for identifying trends across the organization or a location. In practice, that means if one executive briefing room had a bad meeting yesterday, start in the Teams admin center or Pro Management Portal. If three rooms in the same office are having intermittent issues during the same time window, move quickly to CQD and look for a site or network pattern. For MTR Windows, selecting the specific room from the Rooms tab on the left panel, then selecting Call history provides a list of calls that have taken place. Admins can then drill down to the specific call having experiencing issues to see a detailed analysis as shown below:
When drilling down to the specific meeting, a detailed list of network telemetry becomes available to the admin. This provides critical data points on what could be causing the issue. In the example below, we can see that the max round-trip-time for outgoing network traffic is less than ideal thereby causing poor audio or video quality:
Tip #3: Check the network first—because that’s where most quality issues live
Microsoft’s guidance on call quality repeatedly points to a familiar set of root causes: incomplete firewall or proxy configuration, poor Wi-Fi coverage, insufficient bandwidth, VPN usage, outdated clients and drivers, and problematic subnets or network devices. It is always recommended to avoid wireless networking where possible, bypassing proxy/SSL inspection/deep packet inspection for real-time traffic, using local internet and DNS egress, and validating that the correct firewall ports are open For Teams Rooms specifically, Microsoft recommends wired network connectivity. If bandwidth becomes constrained, Teams prioritizes traffic in the order of audio first, then content sharing, then participant video. Microsoft’s current Teams Rooms QoS guidance also recommends allocating 10 Mbps to each Teams Rooms resource account if you apply a meeting policy for media bitrate limits, noting that rooms typically use only what they need—often around 3–4 Mbps—while dynamically adjusting to available network conditions.
For a deeper dive into network related issues, CQD becomes even more valuable when enriched with building or endpoint data. Microsoft states that location-enhanced reporting helps determine whether the issue is isolated to one user or room versus a broader site-level problem. That distinction is critical in Teams Rooms environments because room problems are often blamed on the device when the actual issue sits in Wi-Fi, a local switch path, or a proxy/firewall configuration affecting that site. Microsoft provides an excellent article that helps Teams admins develop a process for monitoring and maintaining call and meeting quality for your organization by using Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard (CQD). This guidance emphasizes audio-quality scenarios because any network improvements made to improve the audio experience will translate to improvements in video and sharing. Key to this guidance are the two curated Power BI query templates - we recommend that you download them with CQD. The link to the article is here Use CQD to manage call and meeting quality in Microsoft Teams. Below shows a sample Power BI page using the provided Quality of Experience Report (QER) template:
Microsoft’s guidance on call quality repeatedly points to a familiar set of root causes: incomplete firewall or proxy configuration, poor Wi-Fi coverage, insufficient bandwidth, VPN usage, outdated clients and drivers, and problematic subnets or network devices. It is always recommended to avoid wireless networking where possible, bypassing proxy/SSL inspection/deep packet inspection for real-time traffic, using local internet and DNS egress, and validating that the correct firewall ports are open For Teams Rooms specifically, Microsoft recommends wired network connectivity. If bandwidth becomes constrained, Teams prioritizes traffic in the order of audio first, then content sharing, then participant video. Microsoft’s current Teams Rooms QoS guidance also recommends allocating 10 Mbps to each Teams Rooms resource account if you apply a meeting policy for media bitrate limits, noting that rooms typically use only what they need—often around 3–4 Mbps—while dynamically adjusting to available network conditions.
For a deeper dive into network related issues, CQD becomes even more valuable when enriched with building or endpoint data. Microsoft states that location-enhanced reporting helps determine whether the issue is isolated to one user or room versus a broader site-level problem. That distinction is critical in Teams Rooms environments because room problems are often blamed on the device when the actual issue sits in Wi-Fi, a local switch path, or a proxy/firewall configuration affecting that site. Microsoft provides an excellent article that helps Teams admins develop a process for monitoring and maintaining call and meeting quality for your organization by using Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard (CQD). This guidance emphasizes audio-quality scenarios because any network improvements made to improve the audio experience will translate to improvements in video and sharing. Key to this guidance are the two curated Power BI query templates - we recommend that you download them with CQD. The link to the article is here Use CQD to manage call and meeting quality in Microsoft Teams. Below shows a sample Power BI page using the provided Quality of Experience Report (QER) template:
Since we are interested to look at the maximum round-trip time for the outgoing network stream, the Power BI report will allow us to select "Uplink details" from the bottom tab and show us the specific locations and many other important metrics related to the problem areas. An example screenshot is shown below:
As can be seen from the Power BI report, CQD can provide is valuable telemetry that can help to identify the specific areas causing problems with call quality. There is a large selection of data points that CQD and Power BI can provide and covering all of them would be beyond the scope of this blogpost. A separate article covering this in more detailed is planned in the coming months.
Tip#4: Validate room health, peripherals, and management signals
Once network conditions look reasonable, shift to room health. Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management is designed to monitor room systems and peripherals using telemetry-based health signals, generate incidents, and support automated diagnostics or remediation in some cases. Microsoft describes incidents such as “Need Action” or “System Investigating,” and health signals for conditions like Teams sign-in failures, Exchange sign-in failures, calendar sync issues, device or peripheral abnormalities, and monitored/offline states.
That makes Pro Management especially useful when the complaint is vague—“the room is unreliable”—because you can quickly determine whether the room was unhealthy before the meeting ever started. Microsoft also documents that the Pro Management reporting area includes health and usage reports, with room usage visibility tied to calendar information and call quality data. In other words, you can move beyond reactive troubleshooting and start identifying rooms that are statistically more fragile than the rest of the fleet. Below is a screen shot of the heal signals that Pro Management Portal provides:
Tip#4: Validate room health, peripherals, and management signals
Once network conditions look reasonable, shift to room health. Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management is designed to monitor room systems and peripherals using telemetry-based health signals, generate incidents, and support automated diagnostics or remediation in some cases. Microsoft describes incidents such as “Need Action” or “System Investigating,” and health signals for conditions like Teams sign-in failures, Exchange sign-in failures, calendar sync issues, device or peripheral abnormalities, and monitored/offline states.
That makes Pro Management especially useful when the complaint is vague—“the room is unreliable”—because you can quickly determine whether the room was unhealthy before the meeting ever started. Microsoft also documents that the Pro Management reporting area includes health and usage reports, with room usage visibility tied to calendar information and call quality data. In other words, you can move beyond reactive troubleshooting and start identifying rooms that are statistically more fragile than the rest of the fleet. Below is a screen shot of the heal signals that Pro Management Portal provides:
If you’re not licensed for full Pro Management features, the Teams admin center still supports device monitoring and log download, and Microsoft also supports device health alerts and rules for offline-state monitoring. That gives smaller estates a lighter-weight way to detect room issues before a VIP meeting discovers them the hard way.
Tip #5: Check software versions, known issues, and device state
Not every poor-quality incident is pure network. Microsoft’s current Teams guidance specifically calls out inconsistent or outdated client versions and drivers as recurring contributors to bad meeting experiences. Separate Teams Rooms documentation also maintains a known issues list for Teams Rooms on Windows, which is worth checking whenever symptoms begin after updates or appear inconsistent with the room’s historical behavior. The known issues list is available at https://aka.ms/TeamsRoomsKnownIssues
It’s also important to verify whether the room is truly online and monitored. Microsoft’s Teams Rooms Pro Management troubleshooting guidance notes that when a device is unmonitored or offline, health telemetry, scheduled updates, automatic remediation, and remote tasks such as log collection or restart can fail. If a room shows an unhealthy monitored/offline status, Microsoft provides a dedicated agent test tool workflow and notes that TPM status can affect Teams Rooms Pro Management enrollment and continuity. To use this agent test tool, login as admin to the MTRW system and on a browser open https://aka.ms/mtrp/agenttesttoolv2. Open the .zip file, and then double-click or tap the MTRPro.AgentTestTool.exe executable. When you're prompted to extract the file, select Run to execute it directly. After the agent test tool completes, a brief summary of the tool's results is displayed in the PowerShell console. After this the following information is available:
Tip #5: Check software versions, known issues, and device state
Not every poor-quality incident is pure network. Microsoft’s current Teams guidance specifically calls out inconsistent or outdated client versions and drivers as recurring contributors to bad meeting experiences. Separate Teams Rooms documentation also maintains a known issues list for Teams Rooms on Windows, which is worth checking whenever symptoms begin after updates or appear inconsistent with the room’s historical behavior. The known issues list is available at https://aka.ms/TeamsRoomsKnownIssues
It’s also important to verify whether the room is truly online and monitored. Microsoft’s Teams Rooms Pro Management troubleshooting guidance notes that when a device is unmonitored or offline, health telemetry, scheduled updates, automatic remediation, and remote tasks such as log collection or restart can fail. If a room shows an unhealthy monitored/offline status, Microsoft provides a dedicated agent test tool workflow and notes that TPM status can affect Teams Rooms Pro Management enrollment and continuity. To use this agent test tool, login as admin to the MTRW system and on a browser open https://aka.ms/mtrp/agenttesttoolv2. Open the .zip file, and then double-click or tap the MTRPro.AgentTestTool.exe executable. When you're prompted to extract the file, select Run to execute it directly. After the agent test tool completes, a brief summary of the tool's results is displayed in the PowerShell console. After this the following information is available:
- A detailed report (in HTML format) of the tests that are performed and their results.
- A .zip file containing additional details and logs is generated in the C:\Rigel\MTRProAgentTestTool directory. This .zip file contains additional information that's required by Microsoft Support during investigation.
And below is the screenshot of the html test report top section. There are many sections as you scroll down which provides excellent metrics regarding the health of the device:
In conclusion, the best Teams Rooms troubleshooting mindset is to treat poor-quality calls as a data problem, not a guessing game. Microsoft’s own guidance consistently points admins toward a layered model: individual call analytics for the incident, CQD for the pattern, and room-health tooling for remediation. Hopefully this blogpost will serve as a guiding framework for Teams Rooms admins in maintaining their Teams Room devices in an always healthy and ready-to-run state.
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