It was the coldest winter ever. Many animals, unable to find shelter, simply perished in the freezing conditions. The porcupines, having seen what had happened to their fellow creatures, decided to huddle together to keep warm. Naturally, being in such close proximity to each other resulted in many painful pokes from their colleagues’ quills, but with no other way to survive they learnt to live with the discomfort.
There is a nice lesson here about ignoring one’s own pain for the greater good, but what does it all have to do with VoIP and unified communications? Well, sometimes there is an advantage in having multiple points reaching out in all directions, and this is certainly the case for the Direct Routing SBC in Microsoft Teams environments.
Conceptually, the Direct Routing SBC is similar to a porcupine with multiple virtual quills spreading out to connect Teams clients and endpoints on one side with SIP trunks and the PSTN on the other.
By virtue of its position within the Teams calling architecture, the SBC is also able to monitor and record the voice quality of each call directly, end-to-end from the Teams client via the SBC out to the SIP trunk.
This can provide IT managers with essential insights into their users’ quality of experience. But it doesn’t take into account peer-to-peer Teams calls between clients and endpoints within the same tenant. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Graph API exists to provide a vast array of information relating to all forms of Teams-to-Teams calls, including conference calls, chat, video and voice quality of service. In addition, the API provides information about call participants and the devices they are using, as well as technical information about call signaling and lower level network layer protocols.
So, now we have the ability to monitor voice quality for Direct Routing calls via the SBC and SIP trunk on the one hand and for internal Teams calls via the Graph API on the other. To complete the picture, we need a solution to combine these two sources of data into a single repository that will enable IT managers to achieve a holistic, network-wide snapshot of voice quality and users’ quality of experience.
Fortunately, AudioCodes provides an answer to this dilemma with the latest version of our unique One Voice Operations Center (OVOC) management solution.
Enhanced Microsoft Teams QoE Monitoring
With the newly released software version 8.0, OVOC is now fully integrated with Microsoft Teams QoE monitoring services, enabling Teams administrators to fulfill SLAs and deliver reliable and high-quality Teams calling to their users. OVOC’s new capabilities include:
- QoE monitoring for internal Teams calls and Direct Routing sessions
- Defining thresholds and alarms for a range of QoE parameters
- Monitoring QoE in Teams meetings
- Support for multi-tenant scenarios in hosted Teams environments
One of the major concerns of company executives when migrating to a new UC solution such as Microsoft Teams is how will their users’ quality of experience be affected. Thanks to Graph API, our Direct Routing SBCs and OVOC putting all the pieces together, you can be sure that this prickly subject has a comprehensive and effective solution.
If you want to learn more about AudioCodes’ end-to-end Microsoft Teams quality of experience monitoring solution, click below to watch our recent webinar where we presented the solution in depth.
