MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams – Monitoring and Analyzing Service Usage

1. Microsoft Teams Usage Reports

One of the things that’s important for us as teams administrators is we need the ability to view reporting information and monitoring information and gather some analytics as to the goings on that are happening in our organization involving teams. So Microsoft has actually created a way for us to do some of that through the Teams Admin Center. So let’s take a look at it. We’re going to start here in Portal, Microsoft off. We’re going to go over here to the left where it says Teams. We’re going to go into the Teams Admin center again. If that does not show up, just click the show all Ellipse symbol. All right? Once we get into the Teams Admin Center, we’re going to go here to analytics and reports. So let’s drop that down and we’ve got usage reports. So the different reports we can look at.

We’ve got app usage, we’ve got PSTN blocked users that’s public switch, telephone network blocked users, PST and Minute SMS pools. We’ve got PST and SMS usage, teams device usage, live event usage, just Teams usage in general, and then Teams user activity. All right? So for example, I want to see app usage. I could set the date range, let me do up to 90 days here. Just run the report and it’s going to generate a little report we can look at here. We can see how many users were using which device, which apps, and we can see exactly which apps were being used here. So we got the app name, the active users, the app type, the active teams that were using it, all right? The publisher of the app, the version of the app, that gives us some good information. Let’s take a look at Teams user activities for the last past 90 days.

All right? So Team User activity, you can see that that in my little environment, I’m the one who I guess is used at the most, right? But we got some other users here. We have one of them that’s a guest, but it shows you channel messages, reply messages, post messages, chat messages, all right? Meeting participated, meetings organized, group calls, one to one calls. And of course you can move your mouse cursor across here to get kind of an idea of how many were happening on a particular day. All right, so we got a bunch of different little reports here that we can run and we can take a look at. And if you got your own environment set up, I encourage you to go in and take a look at these reports to get a feel for them, all right? But it’s pretty easy to read, pretty easy to understand. Here is team usage.

So I’ve got a team name, active users, guest, active channels, how many messages were posted. It gives me a good bit of information here that I can look at. Channel messages, urgent messages, reactions, mentions, meetings organized, whether they were public, private, okay, all of that. And you can also, if you want, if you click on each one of these little buttons here, it will kind of highlight for you what you’re actually looking at. As you can see, it’s kind of adjusting based on what I click here. The other cool thing about this is that if I want, I can have it run the report and the report will show up under Downloads. Okay? So you can come over here under Downloads and you can download this little report. It will download as a CSV file. And then if you want, you can open that up through Excel.

All right. But all in all, this is hopefully you’ll notice this is pretty easy to manage, pretty easy to use, and it gives you some good information. I do feel like that this is kind of in its infancy. I feel like that over the course of the next year or so, microsoft is going to add a lot more to this, to this analytics and reports area. But right now we have this usage reports we can look at and it does give us some good information involving our team’s environment.

2. Microsoft 365 Usage Reports

One of the great features that we have just in Microsoft 365 in general is the ability to look at some analytic data involving the usage of the different services that we’re offering to our users here. And so let’s take a look at this. We’re here on Portal, microsoft. com. If we come over here to the left, we can click the Show All Ellipse symbol, all right? And then we’re just going to click this little reports drop down and you’ll see usage right here. So we’ll click on Usage and I can see just by default the last 30 days. And it’s giving me information involving Office Three and 165, Exchange OneDrive, SharePoint Skype for Business, Yammer Teams, all that stuff is going to show up here for me. All right? So from there you can look at individual usage. So I’ve got email activity here. Microsoft Teams activity OneDrive.

Files being utilized here. It kind of shows you what’s up and what’s down for this period. The little up arrow, as you can see here. You can also click on these. For example, I can click on Microsoft Teams activity. It’ll let me switch back and forth from Channel Messages, chat messages, okay? And if you click it individually, it’ll open up a second report which is going to give you some usage information as well. So if I want to do, let’s say the last 90 days, I can see Usage Activity, channel Messages and all that. For the last 90 days, I can see the usernames Last Activity date, channel Messages, chat messages, calls messages, and I can even export this if I want. And I can pull this into a CSV file. So Microsoft gives us another way here that we can gather some information involving our different reports, but not just for teams, but the other products as well.

Of course, I’m kind of focusing on teams here, but a great, this is just a quick great way for us to see username Last Activity Date, channel messages, all that stuff, and set a specific period, seven days, 30 days, 90 days, 180 days. It doesn’t quite give you as much information involving Teams as our Teams Usage report located in the Teams Admin Center, but it does definitely give us some good information we can look at. And again, if we want to, if we want to look at the products in general, not just teams, then we can, right? So if I wanted to go to SharePoint here, I can look at SharePoint information as well, all right? And you get some of the same types of information here.

So Last Activity Date files viewed or edited, files synced, files shared internally, externally. That’s very valuable from a security standpoint, all right, that you can look at. And all this information too can be exported into Microsoft Power Bi, the business intelligence and utilized by Power Bi to gather even more analytic data. But all in all, these are pretty easy little reports to look at. And again, I encourage you to jump in. If you’ve got a tenant of yours own, take a look at these and get a feel for what these different reports are going to provide you with as you kind of look through each one.

3. Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and Power BI Templates

Quality dashboard. This is something that Microsoft has put together to allow admins network engineers to try to go through and monitor the overall quality of calls as well as meeting quality@the. org wide level. So instead of analyzing just individual users, you’re sort of looking at everything as a whole. And that’s what you want to remember about this. Between this and the difference of call analytics, this is going to really help you with also optimizing your network, making sure your performance is where it needs to be. If you’re working with a network engineer who’s got to kind of account for the bandwidth and all that, that can be also very valuable.

Okay? So this is a great way for us to kind of get an overall big picture look, or as I like to say, a 50,000 foot look of what’s going on in our environment involving our different calls. Here’s an example of one of the little reports that you could generate from this through the call quality dashboard. So as you look there, you can see, you can see the audio streams, monthly trends, server client monthly trend, client monthly trend in general, and you can also get a daily trend as well. And this is going to give you a good kind of a quick look at the performance levels, whether you’ve got good, whether you’ve got poor performance, and it will even help you figure out the percentage of poor performance as well.

So this gives you some good information involving just that overall look of your entire environment. You’ve also noticed too in that little picture there, you can see the overall call quality, you can look at server to client, client to client, you can look at voice quality, all of that stuff as well. Now another thing you can do is with Microsoft’s Power Bi, the business intelligence, you can leverage the data from Call quality dashboard and you can pull that into Power Bi as well. Some people are more comfortable with using Power Bi. In this course, we kind of just talk about Power Bi. Power Bi isn’t really something that this is focusing on.

There’s actually a whole other course on Power Bi. There’s lots of courses that get into all that. There’s actually certifications involving and everything else. But ultimately Power Bi business intelligence is going to allow you to pull all this data in and you can run very advanced queries against it. Some of you guys might remember Microsoft had SQL Server reporting Services and all that’s, very similar to that concept of being able to write queries and query specific information. Okay? So the other thing you can do is you can download the templates for this as well. And so I’ll show you that here. In just a second, I’ll jump in and show you where those templates are.

But you can actually grab the templates for Power Bi. So when you open the templates in Power Bi, it will prompt you to authenticate your credentials, your CQD credentials. And at that point you can customize the queries any way you want and provide that out. You do have to have a Power Bi license as well. Just keep that in mind. Let me jump right in here and I’ll show you real quick where these templates are. So if you open up a search engine and just search these keywords here, use Power Bi to analyze CQD data. You search those keywords, you’ll see this article right here that Microsoft has created this document.

Use Power bi to analyze CQD data. So if you click that, you can download the templates right here. So download the Power Bi templates and it’ll pull them into a zip file and you can use those templates. So great way for you to get those Power Bi templates and use that to write your custom queries involving the CQD. Now, as far as getting into the CQD, all you have to do is go to portal Microsoftcom, open up your team’s Admin center, and you’re going to see it towards the very bottom lefthand corner. So there it is right there. You’re going to click that, it may ask you to sign in if you haven’t already. And then at that point you got your different reports.

4. Understanding Call Analytics

Call analytics is a place you can go into for each user and you can determine what the quality of a meeting or a call was with a particular user. So I can actually view this analytic data. It’s going to show me information about the network, the connectivity, the devices that were used, and it’s going to tell me what the quality of that call or meeting was. So it’s a great way for, for you to troubleshoot quality issues with your user. If you have a user that’s telling you that the voices are sounding robotic or it’s skipping things like that, you can try and troubleshoot this and help them figure out why that might be the case.

Okay, this will basically help you try and isolate problems and try to figure out the root of the cause of that poor quality connection. Now, this is actually located in the Teams Admin center. You’re going to essentially click on the Users drop down for the Users button that’s in the Team’s Admin Center. And you can click on each individual user and you can view the Call History tab for that user’s profile. And this is going to show you information involving their calls and meetings for the last 30 days. You’ll see there on the example I’ve got here, you can see the audio quality if the call was complete or if it got cut off. You can even see information about the hardware, like as you can see the microphone type that they had speakers, all of that as well.

So this is going to give you some good information in regards to what’s going on with a user when they make a call and perhaps they’re having problems. Now another thing involving problems and troubleshooting with this is Microsoft has two main roles that you can assign to people if you need to. You have the Teams Communication Support Specialist role which is meant to be sort of like a tier one support and then you’ve got tier two which is the Team’s Communication Support Engineer. So the support specialist is mainly just going to handle basic call quality problems. They’re not really going to be the ones to investigate and fix the issues.

They’re just going to basically collect information and then escalate that up to an engineer if the problem is something that an engineer is going to have to fix. So a support engineer can see all information in detail, call logs, even some of the things that are hidden that a specialist is not going to be able to see. So ultimately those are your two main roles. If you are taking the exam, make sure you know the difference. Those facts I just gave you on those two different roles. But ultimately this is a great way for us to sort of delegate some control over to this so that you have a group of people that can help troubleshoot call related problems within teams.

5. Viewing Call Analytics

Even though there’s not really a ton of information that we can look at here, because we don’t have a big environment of data to analyze, we can at least look at where the call analytic data is. So we’re going to start out here on portal Microsoft. com. We’re going to click on the Teams Admin Center, all right, pull that up. And then we’re going to go to this little user there’s, Blade button we can click on here and then we can choose our different users. So for example, if I chose John Christopher examlabpractice. com, I can click on call history and this is the location of where that’s going to be, the call analytic data. So I can click on a call and then I can choose device System connectivity and I can read details about each individual one of these.

Okay, one thing I really like about this, if you’ll notice, you’ve got Bill Williams here communicating with John Christopher. And so you can look at Bill Williams device System connectivity, and then you can look at John Christopher connectivity system device, and then here’s the network that connected them and you can get analytic data on that. Also another thing you can do is you can export this as a spreadsheet if you want and view that data. So again, not a lot here I can look at just because I don’t have a big environment here. If you do have a production environment you can look at though on this, I encourage you to jump in and take a look at it because it’ll give you some good information that you can glean from this call analytic data that Microsoft makes available to you.