Call Analytics for Teams Rooms Devices

In this blog post, we go over the procedure on how to analyze call and meeting quality for Microsoft Teams Room Android or Windows devices. The Microsoft Teams Admin Center (TAC) has the ability to allow administrators to perform Call Analytics that provides detailed information about calls and meetings for Teams Room devices. It includes data on devices, networks, connectivity, and call quality. This is especially useful for troubleshooting poor call quality for specific devices, isolate problem areas (e.g., network issues, firewall blockage, proxy delays and other latency problems). Sometimes during a particular meeting, users may experience inaudible or broken audio as well as video freezing or no video at all. Call analytics is one of the best tools available to determine the root causes.

To begin, login to the Teams Admin Center (TAC) with Teams global or device administrator credentials and select the Teams devices tab on the left, and then choose whether the devices is Android or Windows. In the example shown below, we are selecting Teams Rooms on Android. Then from the list of device shown, select the particular device in the room that is experiencing issues, in the example below we click on the Poly G62 device:

We will then be able to see the details of the selected device. As can be seen from the 7-DAY QUALITY graph, while most calls were good, there were indeed some poor calls highlighted in red. We want to look into the poor calls and analyze the details. We can do this by clickiing on the Activity tab below:

A closer look at the the Activity lists shows all the calls that the device has made in chronological order and we can see the audio quality of each call. Note that one of the cals had poor quality audio highlighted in red and we can click on this particular call to see in depth analysis of this specific call:

When we analyze the details of this specific call, we can see that issues started around 0:45min into the call. Next, we can click on the Participant details tab to see more details about the call as shown below:

We then select the Start time where the poor quality was detected in the call as shown below:

This brings us to the segment of the call where poor quality was detected. Here, TAC call analytics has determined that the Poor call quality caused by an audio device. This should prompt the administrator to investigate further into whether the audio device such as the microphone or speaker was faulty, or if the cables connecting them was loose. In cases where we suspect that the poor quality could be due to network issues, we can click on the Network icon as shown below:

As can be seen in the diagram above, we are able to see al the network analytics for this particular call. Specifically, we are looking for 

• Average round-trip time
• Maximum round-trip time
• Average jitter
• Maximum jitter
• Average packet loss rate
• Maximum packet loss rate

If these values do not meet the minimum requirements as stated in the documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/optimizing-your-network/media-quality-and-network-connectivity-performance, then we can look further into network related issues such as over congested network, faulty network cables or switches/routers as well as firewall and proxy latency issues

It is also a good practice to review the bandwidth requirements for Teams calls here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network 

Administrators may also obtain even more detailed analytics from the Advanced tab including the hardware details and even more network related data as shown below:

Finally, the Debug tab provides the greatest details of the call, which is beyond the scope of this blogpost, as shown below:

In conclusion, the Teams Admin Center (TAC) provides valuable tools for us to analyze call details of each Teams room devices which gives administrators great insights into why a meeting had experience poor audio or video quality during the call.