Techdays 2018 - Call Quality from headset to cloud

Presented by Mattias Kressmark (that's me! :-) )

The presentation started with defining Call Quality and why it is a good thing to monitor and work with call quality - it benefits many applications running on the network really. All clients, new as old, Lync, Skype for business and Teams sends a VQR - voice quality report - at the end of a call. The Call quality dashboard will then categorize the audio streams as good, bad or unknown based on the definition found in the article: Stream Classification in Call Quality Dashboard.

A stream is determined to be unknown when CQD is unable to classify the stream. This could be due to a network outage, a client exiting abruptly or the stream were to short / contained to few packets to be classified.

The Call Quality Dashboard (or Samtalskvalitetsinstrumentbrädan as we say in Swedish)  is a single page dashboard that provides an at a glance view monthly, and daily trends for call quality. CQD integrates tenant subnets and building data to provide location-based insights. Some 354 dimensions and 229 measures of call quality and reliability for audio, video and application sharing is currently available in CQD. The service is hosted in the Azure region where your tenant is homed, that is NOAM, EMEA or APAC. CQD is accessible by Skype for Business Tenant Admins or Report Reader roles, Global Admin is not required. As of Aug 2018, CQD includes Quality of Experience reports.

The Call Quality Dashboard works with Measures, Dimensions and Filters in a SQL cube so that you could "query" the data in the following way: "Give me the number of Poor streams (measure) by building (dimension) for the past month (filter)" The Call Quality Dashboard works with streams, not calls and have a system for naming participants as "first" or "second".

The presentation continued with 5 demos on the Call Quality Dashboard

• Building data
• SOF - CQD Sample Template
• Devices
• TCP / UDP
• Packet loss, Jitter, Round Trip

The Skype for Business Network Assessment Tool can be used to test networks before allowing media for either Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams. The tool can also be used to determine if UDP is allowed to / from Office 365 and it can be made to make calls over a long time period like 7 days.

The Network Testing Companion is a neat GUI to the Skype for Business Network Assessment Tool.

With the ”On-premise Health Report Pack” it has been possible to extract data from on-premises Skype for business systems and load this data into a PowerBI template. This functionality will become available for CQD online with the CQD Power BI Connector.

Other coming features in the CQD roadmap are:

• Near-Real-Time (NRT) data which will give faster data availability (15-30 mins)
• Up to 12 months of historic data.
• Personally Identifiable Information (PII) user names, IP addresses, MAC addresses and BSSIDs will be in CQD reports.

Skype for business 2019 which now is released! Contains the "Cloud Call Data Connector" which will allow for upload of on-premises call data to be uploaded into CQD online.

Skype for Business 2019 is here!