Anyone who works in the Enterprise knows that we are constantly the subject of “What did you do?!” Ther e are certain products that take the blame when things go wrong like UEM or VDI. Microsoft has recently released VDI meeting health stats to all VDI platforms, including Windows 365 (includes calls too!) I thought this would be a great chance to take a look at its usability and how it can help us during these difficult times.
What is Teams Call Health?
Teams Call Health is a view inside of Teams that will show you real-time metrics helping a user figure out what is causing issues in their meeting. The metrics are partitioned into 4 categories to help keep people focused. They are network, audio, video, and screen sharing. Let’s check out each of those areas in more detail.
Network Health
Teams Send Limit: This is the max data limit that teams can send based on network conditions. (Not ISP-driven)
Teams Receive Limit: The max data limit that Teams can receive based on network conditions (Also Not ISP-driven)
Roundtrip Time: This is your total MS between your system and Teams. In one-on-one calls, this is peer-to-peer.
Received Packet Loss: How many packets you’re losing, which is often indicitive of a bad network connection.
An example can be seen below:
Audio Health
Sent bitrate: How much audio data has been sent
Sent packets: How many data packets have been sent over the network for audio
Roundtrip time: This is your total MS between your system and the Teams infrastructure.
Sent codec: The codec that is being used for audio encoding.
Received jitter: Distortion in audio caused by packet issues
Received packets: How many data packets have been received for audio
Received packet loss: How many packets you’re losing, which is often indicitive of a bad network connection.
Received codec: The codec that is being used to encode received audio data
An example can be seen below:
Video Health
Sent frame rate: How many video frames are being sent per second
Sent width/height: The video resolution being sent
Sent bitrate: How much video data your device sends
Roundtrip time: This is your total MS between your system and the Teams infrastructure.
Sent packets: How many data packets have been sent over the network for video
Sent codec: The codec that is being used for video encoding.
Video processing: The resource being used to encode your video
Screen Sharing
Sent frame rate: How many video frames are being sent per second
Sent width/height: The video resolution being sent
Sent codec: The codec that is being used for video encoding.
Screen share and processing: Specifies if CPU or GPU is being used for video encoding
Received frame rate: How many video frames are being received per second
Received width/height: The video resolution being received
Received codec: The codec being used for processing and encoding the screen share data
Screen share received processing: Specifies if CPU or GPU is being used for screen share video encoding
Why does What is Teams Call Health Matter?
Teams VDI architecture is slightly dfifferent than with physical endpoints. You can see that architecture at a high-level below:
You certainly have more to contend with. Luckily, with those of us that are on Windows 365 or AVD we get additional optimizations and being closer to the stack is always helpful. When users come to you screaming VDI sucks, now you have some “backup.”
The great thing as well as this data is available in the Teams Admin Console under the respective user, to give you some historical along with your real-time data: (Access that via the user > Meetings & calls)
One thing I am still working on is seeing if it is properly capturing that it came from a VDI or a desktop device, which will help with the troubleshooting process. Source IP information solves that problem too, but I think a clear delineation and potentially filtering to session only on VDI would be a big help here.
Regardless, anything that people on the VDI set can get to show that it’s not just “that frigging VDI” again and maybe a Teams issue, network issues, etc. is a huge boon to all of us!
You can access it in any meeting from “More” > “Settings” > “Call Health”
