The most dreaded call that someone working the IT help desk can receive is from a user complaining about poor call quality.
These user experience problems are typically highly visible, disruptive, and hard to isolate. They are also fleeting. The data required to pinpoint call quality issues has never been readily available, or even if available, was never aggregated in such a way to help anyone actually find the root cause or optimize performance. There have been device-centric monitoring tools that focus on the endpoint, and there have been application performance monitoring (APM) solutions that measure how the app is performing against SLAs, but there were many gaps in between, leaving IT teams with little insight into performance issues or outages across the network and ability for problem remediation.
Digital experience monitoring telemetry for diagnosing poor call quality typically starts from the UCaaS provider (such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom) that provides dashboards with call quality metrics that they are measuring. From there, a mean opinion score (MOS), a numerical measure of the human-judged overall quality of voice and video sessions, can be computed on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being a perfect call. But that’s where the diagnostics would often end––finding where a user with a 3.6 MOS call quality (akin to a slightly garbled cell phone call) actually had the breakdown was always difficult.
The missing pieces required to pinpoint the root cause were the network path details to identify sources of packet loss or latency, and the user’s machine diagnostics to identify CPU, memory, or Wi-Fi stats gone awry. And then, there was the difficulty in correlating the data provided by the UCaaS vendors with these real-time network and device stats collected during the actual call or meeting.
Well, the days of not knowing why call quality degraded have finally come to an end if you are a Zscaler customer. Zscaler's experience monitoring solution, Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), integrates with your existing deployment of the Zscaler Client Connector (no new agents required) to provide end-user experience monitoring to supplement data provided by UCaaS providers. Because the Client Connector enabled with ZDX is always on, network performance and endpoint metrics are continuously being collected.
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Here's a sneak preview
One of the innovations you'll see at the November event is a new integration with the Microsoft Team Call Quality API to pull in call, video, and sharing quality stats for every Teams meeting taking place. This data is then seamlessly married with network path (CloudPath) and endpoint device metrics that ZDX has been collecting during the course of the Teams meeting (from every employee every few minutes). When a user reports a poor Teams experience, ZDX provides an integrated workflow to look at call quality metrics, network details, performance data, and endpoint details, helping to identify the root cause of the problem, which could be anything from a Wi-Fi issue, high ISP latency, high CPU, and more (read my blog on tips for finding root causes).
Now, those “poor call quality” tickets are nothing to fear. You can see where issues are occurring all in one place. Even better, because ZDX continually monitors performance, you can often be proactive, finding and fixing issues before they result in a ticket.
Here's how it looks in practice with ZDX:
Figure 1: ZDX computes an aggregated call quality score and scores over time, by organization, region, geo, department, and more, based on call quality metrics gathered from the Microsoft Teams Call Quality API
Figure 2: ZDX captures the meetings that occurred over the specified time period, along with the associated call quality, ZDX Score, and participant information
Figure 3: For each meeting, ZDX can display all the participants of that meeting, along with their individual call quality, ZDX score, audio, hardware, and connection information
Figure 4: ZDX highlights audio, video, and sharing latency, jitter, and loss metrics for each meeting an end-user attended
Figure 5: While the Teams meeting is in progress, ZDX captures CloudPath details and can pinpoint spikes in latency or packet loss and the specific hop where that spike occurred
Figure 6: While the Teams meeting is in progress, ZDX also captures changes in the user’s device, highlighting changes in network settings, CPU speed, etc., that may be impacting Teams call quality
Additional Resources:
Gartner 2020 Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring (reg. required)
What is Digital Experience Monitoring?
Digital Experience Monitoring with ZDX
What is Digital Experience Monitoring
What is End-User Experience Monitoring
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