Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Our previous blog gave a quick overview of an all-too real scenario involving poor Microsoft Teams performance and frustrated VIP users. The situation, picking up on our recent Power Moves webinar, centered on a big board meeting held over Teams that suffered from multiple call quality issues — spurring the CEO to pay a stormy visit to IT. In that case, the issue had already happened, and our point was that with native Microsoft tools, it can be hard to get to a precise root cause quickly.

Imagine you’re the IT lead responsible for your organization’s Microsoft Teams experience. A big call with the board comes up, loaded with company VIPs — and it’s chock full of issues. Lag, choppy audio, bad connections. After the call, there’s a knock at your door. Not a happy knock. You answer and standing there is your CEO, stamping her foot demanding to know what went wrong.

For IT teams managing Teams Phone performance, the SBC is kind of a ‘last frontier’. Issues that occur there are hard to track down. Critical information slips out of view or can’t easily be associated with what users are experiencing. Our latest update to Vantage DX closes the Microsoft Teams Phone SBC monitoring visibility gap with automated correlation of SBC records and Teams Phone quality data — the first solution in the industry to do so.

Bells and whistles may inspire great ad headlines, but when it comes to investing in new tools, the only thing most MSPs care about is the business case. “If we buy this, how will it make us more efficient and more profitable?” Period.

LDI Connect is taking its managed IT services to the next level by adding Martello’s Vantage DX platform to its toolkit. This move is all about giving clients a smoother, more reliable Microsoft 365 and Teams experience … and it couldn’t come at a better time. By integrating Vantage DX, LDI Connect can now proactively monitor clients’ Microsoft environments.

It’s one of those unspoken facts of business that the better something is managed, the less people notice. Everything just glides along. That’s a double-edged sword for managed service providers. On the one hand, you want to give clients a frictionless experience. On the other, you want them to know that’s what they’re getting — and how much you put in to deliver it.

Recurring revenue streams bring stability to any business. For MSPs, that stability can be an essential foundation for service innovation and pursuing growth. Offering subscription-based managed services is an obvious way to get recurring revenue in place. Collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom are prime candidates for subscriptions since businesses depend on them every day, at all levels of the organization, to be productive and profitable.

Few things hold IT teams back more than a lack of visibility. It’s exponentially harder to solve issues when they originate in parts of the environment you can’t see. That’s one of the big limitations of native tools for monitoring and managing Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard, Admin Center and Service Dashboard, and Meeting Room Pro Dashboard are all constrained to the aspects of Teams that Microsoft controls directly.

The more organizations depend on collaboration solutions like Microsoft Teams for productivity, the more IT departments are expected to ensure a seamless experience every time. That demands more than just rapid troubleshooting when issues occur: it requires IT teams to get ahead of problems and keep them from affecting users in the first place. For that, synthetic testing is a must.

If your clients are like most, they use multiple collaboration platforms to drive business and get work done. A common combo is Microsoft Teams and Zoom: over 60% of organizations use both, and together the two have a more than 80% share of the videoconferencing market. More platforms mean more complexity for you to manage — more parameters to watch, more tools to bounce between to keep an eye on things.