teams round trip time high

Microsoft Teams performance optimization in eight steps

Author: Sandra Ruf Business Development Manager Rimscout – connect on LinkedIn

Microsoft Teams meetings have become part of many companies’ daily business, not only since the rise of hybrid work models. However, nothing disrupts the productivity of a meeting more than frozen videos or dropouts in the audio connection. Often, the fault can be traced to the user’s network.

In this blog article, you’ll learn in eight steps how to quickly identify and pinpoint Microsoft Team performance issues, so nothing can get in the way of a smooth meeting.

Need an expert to troubleshoot your performance issues? We can audit your network in preparation for a new service launch with our Cloud Readiness Assessment, or actively help you troubleshoot your team’s performance. Learn more about our assessment portfolio: Rimscout Network Assessment – Rimscout.

Specific network requirements for good audio and video performance

For a successful Microsoft Teams performance optimization, some terminology and requirements must first be clarified. People often generalize about poor or slow performance . How smoothly Microsoft Teams can be used overall is only minimally influenced by the network . What can be optimized, however, is the quality and stability of the audio and video connections . For this, you first need to look at the network protocols used. Audio, video or desktop sharing are fundamentally different in network behavior from conventional connections, such as access to files, SQL servers or websites.

Most services use the secure transmission of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) . The underlying IP stack ensures that lost data is recalled , the correct order of packets is maintained and the transmission is adapted to the available bandwidth. But especially this behavior causes problems for audio and video connections.

Microsoft specifies three essential conditions, which can be easily tracked in a Microsoft Teams Performance Monitoring, for a good audio and video quality:

Latency (RTT or round-trip time) below 100ms

For Microsoft Teams, the transmission time of a packet from the PC to the Microsoft server and back again should be under 100ms . If the latency occasionally exceeds this value, this doesn’t necessarily mean that stable audio and video performance is no longer possible. Especially for connections that are far apart , such as meetings between Germany and the USA, latencies in the range of 150ms to 200 ms are quite normal. However, if the latency exceeds 100ms more often or even permanently, then a degradation of the quality is to be expected and you can assume an ineffective network.

Less than 1% packet loss within a 15s interval

All data traffic (UDP, ICMP, http, etc.) is carried out using packets. Packet loss describes the number of lost packets in a measured period . For UDP connections and therefore for Microsoft Teams audio and video, excessive packet loss leads to stuttering or dropouts in audio and video quality. For other protocols, packets are retransmitted if lost. Here, packet loss becomes noticeable through longer loading times.

Packet inter-arrival jitter lower than 30ms in each 15s interval.

This value indicates the difference between the latencies of the packets . A high jitter means that the delivery time (latency) of the packets varies greatly. Microsoft Teams tries to compensate this with larger buffers and as a result delays the playback accordingly. This means that large variations have a decisive impact on audio and video playback.

In order for Microsoft Teams to be able to capture these key figures and react to them dynamically there is a need for transmission via UDP . When reverting to a TCP or HTTPS protocol, these values are no longer visible.

Proxy servers and SSL VPN connections as the biggest obstacles for Microsoft Teams

In addition to using a TCP protocol , SSL VPNs or cloud proxies can also degrade the quality of audio and video connectivity in Microsoft Teams.

SSL VPNs are systems that allow private data to be transported over public networks and are tunneled in TCP/IP. These are considered to be particularly strong in terms of data security and data protection . But this is exactly where the problem for good and stable audio and video performance lies. With a VPN tunnel, all of a user’s packets do not go directly to the destination in the cloud, but first via configured VPN servers . Often these are located at the site of a company, so that all packets pass through the company network and also through the internal firewall. The path of the packets is therefore extended, which also directly ensures high latency . For audio and video data traffic (UDP), a latency increase of 40ms, triggered by a VPN, can already be critical and cause initial Microsoft Team performance issues . For good audio and video quality, a local breakout should be used with priority so that the packets can take the shortest route. The situation is similar with (cloud) proxies . In general, a proxy is a system that is placed between a SaaS application or a data center and a client . Here, sensitive data can be protected by the proxy acting as a kind of intermediary for the server on which this data is located. All client requests are routed via the proxy to the actual destination. In this way, client and server do not communicate directly with each other and the service can check the transmitted data for malicious content. In this case there is no local breakout used and the result is a higher latency , which in turn is a barrier to good audio and video performance.

How to eliminate of Microsoft Teams performance issues in eight steps

But what can be done if the audio and video performance is no longer sufficient and your daily work routine is severely impaired?

Step 1: Network assessment and client deployment

In order to make a problem visible, a Microsoft Teams performance monitoring is essential. So it is advisable to do a network assessment with Rimscout . This involves selecting users at representative locations within the organization that are affected by acute Microsoft Teams performance problems. Rimscout clients are distributed to these locations and installed on the users’ devices. There, they collect various connection data in the background and test the performance at these locations . The collected data is continuously transferred to the Rimscout portal, where it can be viewed and analyzed. On the one hand, this makes it possible to determine whether some PCs are performing noticeably worse than others. On the other hand, possible causes can be investigated and ruled out so that the Microsoft Teams performance can be optimized.

Step 2: Monitor bandwidth utilization

Before going into further detail with the analysis of the test results, it should be clarified at the beginning if there is enough bandwidth available. Microsoft Teams needs a relatively large bandwidth for excellent performance. For stable audio or video connections, 100 kBit or 2 MBit are required. Compared to the bandwidth required by Outlook (4-8 kBit), Microsoft Teams needs up to 200 times as much continuous load for a good performance.

Step 3: Monitor UDP traffic

The most important indicator of good Microsoft Teams performance in Rimscout is the UDP test . This test determines the latency of UDP traffic to the Teams Media Relay . As specified in Microsoft’s terms and conditions, the measured latency should ideally be less than 100 ms . If the measured values deviate, the cause of the performance problems can usually be found in the network. The causes for this are numerous, but the following steps will help you to narrow them down step by step.

In the Rimscout portal, the measured latency of an affected client is displayed in the test results diagram. If the threshold of 100 ms is exceeded, Rimscout issues a visual warning for this test.

Step 4: Check the firewall configuration

If the UDP test does not return any values at all, the traffic is probably blocked . Microsoft Teams may still work in this case, but audio and video connections will then use TCP, which in turn may cause performance problems. Check the configuration of your firewall or proxy to see if UDP traffic to Microsoft Teams is blocked and change this setting if necessary.

When the Microsoft Teams UDP traffic is blocked, Rimscout no longer displays data for this client in the health overview. This is indicated by gray bars.

Step 5: Check DNS configuration

If the UDP traffic is not blocked but the measured latency is high, another cause may be an incorrect name resolution . Generally, Microsoft Teams determines its cloud peers by means of DNS queries. It becomes problematic when internal clients query the wrong DNS servers, for example on another continent. This problem often occurs with multinational companies .

The Teams Server Name contains a subword that indicates the location of the server, for example swedencentral. For the Exchange Online frontend servers, the IATA code is used analogously to indicate the location . In both cases the specified location should be at least on the same continent as the own client. But if a client from the USA is assigned a Teams server from Japan or Germany during name resolution, this is a clear cause for Microsoft Teams performance issues.

The IATA Airport Code is a code used to uniquely identify locations based on the marking of airports. For example, PAD in this case stands for the location of Paderborn, Germany

Under Clients you can see in the system profile that the user gets a response from the Teams frontend from India, although he works at a location in Germany.

Step 6: Check routing

If the name resolution from the previous step fits, but the latency is still noticeable, the path of the packets should be checked more closely . Microsoft requires short paths, which is why packets from the client to O365 services should use a local breakout if possible. Routing via deployed VPN solutions or (cloud) proxy servers increases latency and worsens the performance. One possible solution is to tunnel the required UDP packets past a VPN or proxy for a Microsoft Teams performance optimization.

Step 7: Check local system devices

Of course, Microsoft Teams performance issues can also have local causes . In Rimscout, the client data of each user can be read out individually to identify possible errors. First of all, the provider’s connection may be insufficient , which has a negative effect on the runtime of the packets. Problems in the local network due to defective cables , overloaded routers and switches or a poor wireless connection can also slow down the speed of all Internet connections. This slowdown is again first noticeable in the audio and video performance.

Rimscout-Portal-First-Hop-Network

In the Client section, the latencies to the first hops into the network are measured (default gateway and Internet provider). In addition, the CPU and RAM load are monitored alongside the WLAN strength.

Step 8: Eliminate the network as the cause

If all the previous steps do not lead to a Microsoft Teams performance optimization and the UDP test also delivers inconspicuous values, the cause may also lay outside the network . Audio and video connections in general place high requirements on the client. Too little RAM , weak CPUs or cheap webcams without any preprocessing of the image signal can also have a negative effect, just like bad or defective headsets . Screen sharing with very high resolutions, such as 4K monitors , also places challenges the client device, and may cause your Microsoft Teams performance issues.

Want to optimize your Microsoft Teams performance? Are you currently experiencing performance issues and need assistance? Our experts can help you not only with a Cloud Readiness Assessment before launching a new service. With a network assessment, we can also actively help you troubleshoot issues with Microsoft Teams, for example. Learn more about our assessment portfolio and request your personalized offer.

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Monitor call and meeting quality in Microsoft Teams

The Call health view in Teams helps you identify and troubleshoot issues you might experience during a Teams meeting or call. In this view you will get data on your network, audio, screen sharing, and outgoing video quality. These real-time metrics are updated every 15 seconds and are best used to troubleshoot issues that last for at least that long.

How to read your call health stats

Screen sharing .

*Exceptionally low values in some scenarios indicate Teams is limiting its peak bandwidth usage to maintain transmission while competing with network traffic or hitting network and service issues between endpoints. In these cases where Teams restricts quality, network conditions should be evaluated to see if something can be improved.

Teams might also limit its peak bandwidth usage if the complexity of screen sharing, video, or audio content is low or if a participant in the call or meeting chose lower-quality settings. Teams will adapt to the current use as well, not just because of network conditions.

Note:  Low frame rates don't necessarily imply a poor call experience. If you are experiencing poor video quality and low frame rates, it could be due to the performance of the computer system or insufficient hardware resources.

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• Tom Arbuthnot
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Understanding Microsoft Teams Real-Time Call Quality Analytics (RTA) Meeting Reporting

Updated 8th November 2022: A change in behaviour where only meetings clicked by an admin while in progress now appear in the Real-Time Reporting “recent meetings” history. This feature is still in preview.

Microsoft Teams gives admins the ability to report on the real-time performance of audio, video, content sharing, and network-related issues in scheduled and Meet Now meetings.

Real-time telemetry is only available for scheduled meetings and Meet Now . it is not available for PSTN, 1:1 calls, and group calls. It is supported on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android and MTR and IP Phones. VDI and CVI clients do not currently send RTA telemetry.

As an admin, you can use this telemetry to investigate these issues during meetings and troubleshoot in real-time.

Real-Time Analytics (RTA) shows detailed information for scheduled Microsoft Teams meetings, updated in real-time in the Teams Admin Center. It includes the following information:

• Meeting Participants
• Join & Leave Time
• Microsoft Teams Room (Surface Hub, Teams Display, Collaboration Bar)
• Microsoft Teams IP Phones
• Changes in connectivity type (Wired to WiFi or WiFi to WWAN)
• Changes in IP addresses (due to a connectivity change)
• Network Metrics (Jitter, Packet Loss, Round Trip Time)
• Audio, Video and Application Sharing (Bitrate, Frame Rate)

You can find Real-Time Analytics under Teams admin center > Users > Manage users , select a user, and open the Meetings & calls tab on the user’s profile page. Where you will see any meetings in progress.

Under Recent meetings, you’ll see completed/ended meetings only if an admin clicked into those meetings while they were in progress. Otherwise, this table will be empty.

Which admin roles can access Microsoft Teams Real-Time Analytics?

• Teams Administrator
• Teams Communications Support Specialist
• Teams Communications Support Engineer

Is there an API for Microsoft Real-Time Analytics (RTA)?

Currently, there is no API access to this data, so it can’t be gathered by API or third party reporting tools.

Is Microsoft Teams Real-Time Analytics a Teams Premium feature?

No, this was initially part of Advanced Communications (a legacy additional user license) but was taken out of advanced comms and does not require Microsoft Teams Premium.

Check out the Microsoft documentation here

Check out a good blog overview from Microsoft here

About the author

A Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, Tom Arbuthnot is Founder and Principal at Empowering.Cloud as well as a Solutions Director at Pure IP.

Tom stays up to date with industry developments and shares news and his opinions on his Tomtalks.blog, UC Today Microsoft Teams Podcast and email list. He is a regular speaker at events around the world.

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Essentials of Microsoft Teams VoIP Monitoring

The custom monitor for Microsoft Teams is a great way to evaluate end-user experience and measure the quality of audio sessions.

Microsoft Office 365 has an upper hand over other tools. The Office 365 ecosystem enables users to easily collaborate while working remotely. Users have a range of solutions to choose from and Office 365 offers an additional advantage – easy integration between these tools. Microsoft Office 365 has over 200 million monthly active users . The COVID-19 pandemic has only increased the number of users relying on Office 365, Microsoft Teams handles 115 million daily active users , a huge increase from 75 million in April this year.

MS Teams helps individuals collaborate over chat, media, video conference, screenshare, file sharing, and built-in integrations to drive productivity. Certain features, such as virtual meetings, are critical for businesses and are used heavily by employees on daily basis.

The pandemic situation has made MS Teams indispensable for hosting business meetings, customer trainings, conferences, and more. It has become important to ensure a good employee experience for the remote workforce. To help businesses monitor the performance of business-critical tools such as MS Teams, we have built a new custom monitor. The custom monitor tracks the health of MS Teams VoIP calls and notifies when performance degradation is detected.

Vital VoIP Performance Metrics

Before we dig deeper into the setup and inner workings of this custom monitor, we need to have a clear understanding of the core performance metrics required to gain visibility into VoIP call performance. These metrics should allow us to evaluate quality of a VoIP call and should answer questions such as:

• Are we able to join the meetings/call?
• Are both parties able to communicate over the call?
• How much of disturbance/noise is experienced over the call?

With these questions in mind, we have selected three vital metrics for measuring VoIP call quality – Round Trip Time, Jitter, and Packet Loss.

Round Trip Time (RTT)

Time taken for a packet to travel from the source to its destination and back is called the RTT and is reported in milliseconds. We need to ensure that the RTT has a lower value and is stable across the audio session.

Fig 1. Round Trip Time (RTT) calculation

Jitter is calculated based on the delay between packets that were expected to be delivered at a particular time. In an audio session, jitter is vital, even though the packets are delivered the end-user experience is impacted. When there is a high level of jitter and packets are misplaced the receiver will not be able to understand the message. Jitter is reported in milliseconds.

Fig 2. Jitter due to network congestion

Packet Loss

Packet loss occurs when one or more data packets traveling across a network fails to reach the destination. Packet loss is either caused by errors in data transmission, typically across wireless networks, or network congestion. Packet loss is measured as number of packets lost.

Fig 3. Packet loss

Understand the Custom Monitor Implementation

MS Teams VoIP custom monitor relies on three main components – initiate an audio session, accept and participate, measure the quality of the session. Let’s look at each one of these components and understand the technical side.

Initiate an audio session

We rely on MS Teams’ calling bot to participate in an audio session. The bot is triggered using Microsoft Teams web version in a Chrome browser. We use Google Puppeteer to simulate the whole user journey – from logging into the web version of Microsoft Teams and initiating an audio session. This enables us to replicate an end user actions and initiate an audio session over webRTC. webRTC is an open-source project for real-time audio, video, data communications in web and native apps. Microsoft Teams web client and native app rely on this WebRTC for audio and video communications.

Answer and participate in the audio session

To auto-accept calls from the Catchpoint script, we use a bot on Azure, Linux environment with Node 12 LTS. To handle all the Incoming calls the apps use Microsoft Graphs Communications API. This bot will ensure that the calls initiated from the Catchpoint script are answered and will enable us to capture audio session metrics to analyze the call quality.

Measure the quality of an audio session

Once the audio session is established, we rely on chrome://webrtc-internals for collecting audio session performance information. This allows us to collect metrics about ongoing WebRTC sessions, like round trip time, packet loss, and Jitter.

Execution Flow for Custom Monitor

Fig 4. Custom Monitor Architecture

• The Catchpoint Portal initiates the custom script on an enterprise node. It passes script related details to the node for execution, for example – script file name.
• The Catchpoint Linux node is where the custom script is placed. All related dependencies are installed in advance.
• A NodeJS Script is invoked to use Google Puppeteer and it initiates a Microsoft Teams call. This call is auto accepted by a bot hosted on Azure.
• The script also launches chrome:// webrtc – internals in a new chrome tab that holds metrics of the ongoing WebRTC sessions. These metrics are reported back to Catchpoint where they are captured with insight feature and plotted in various charts.
• The Azure Nodejs App uses Microsoft’s Bot Builder framework for constructing bots. To auto-accept calls from the Bot, the app uses Microsoft graph APIs.

Once the setup is complete, a comprehensive dashboard can help to visualize the data collected by the custom monitor. In the screenshot below, the top-right displays three vital metrics showing the average value for each. And others highlight each metric over time so we can quickly see if there are any spikes or dips. Other than the three metrics discussed above, we also collect total bytes sent and received and total test time.

Fig 5. Catchpoint Dashboard for Microsoft Teams Monitoring

There have been amazing advances in VoIP that have improved audio quality over the internet. Even with all advances, packet loss remains a major concern impacting performance. High packet loss decreases the quality of the audio session and interferes with the communication.

Jitter is another culprit, the packets are delivered but not in the expected time and order. This can be very annoying to the end users as it makes it distorts the audio and makes it difficult to understand.

Round trip time (RTT) is important when measuring real-time communications. For high audio quality, the entire audio session needs to have a low and stable RTT time.

The custom monitor for Microsoft Teams is a great way to evaluate end-user experience and measure the quality of audio sessions. It helps to understand and analyze performance degradation and trigger alerts when there is a change in end-user experience.

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Karl Sand  | May 29, 2023  | 8 minutes read

Key Metrics to Assess Microsoft Teams Performance and Call Quality

The key metrics for measuring the digital employee experience in Microsoft Teams and identifying performance and call quality issues.

Why Should You Care?

Important metrics for monitoring microsoft teams performance and call quality, 1. user endpoint computer performance is crucial, 2. network performance connecting to the microsoft cloud, 3. microsoft cloud network and data center performance, get the full picture from a comprehensive solution, example: teams call quality details from officeexpert truedem, next steps….

If your organization has deployed Microsoft Teams as your main IT communications and collaboration platform then you will find this Blog very interesting, especially the best practices for monitoring Microsoft Teams performance. Having accurate performance metrics in place is essential to understand the digital employee experience for Microsoft Teams, and to instantly identify any usage problems or call quality issues.

However, many traditional monitoring tools are geared toward capturing only network data from business offices or tracking the uptime for cloud-based applications. They are NOT designed for monitoring Microsoft Teams performance and troubleshooting issues with real-time communication through VoIP and video, from wherever employees are working.

End-users have high expectations for fast, reliable communications technology these days, and IT operations is on point to deliver a consistent digital experience for platforms like Microsoft Teams. Organizations that neglect to monitor the employee experience run the risk of failing to achieve their business goals due to disengaged employees and operationally inefficient innovations, failing to attract new employees, or worse, losing employees to competitors.

By leveraging real-time and historic data about Microsoft Teams call quality performance at global, local, and individual levels an organization can pinpoint, resolve, and often prevent disruptions to communications that affect productivity and employee morale. This is especially true for users working remotely these days. They rely on their own home networks and ISPs which can underperform at times and are usually blind spots for IT operations groups. Having full visibility of performance issues, no matter where users are working, is a necessity with the new work-from-anywhere culture at enterprise organizations.

So, how can you effectively monitor the true digital experience for Microsoft Teams voice/video call performance? This subsection explains what you need to track. And remember, the transparency of the nitty-gritty details is important as each of these requires detailed metrics and analytics to identify chokepoints that cause call quality issues.

There are three different areas, or zones, of the end-to-end journey through which Microsoft Teams voice/video traffic transverses. Each of these requires detailed monitoring and analysis to flag roadblocks causing call quality or performance issues. They include the following:

• 🡺 Endpoint Computer Performance (including what’s consuming the CPU and memory)
• 🡺 Networking Performance Connecting to the Microsoft Cloud (home or business office connectivity, and ISP)
• 🡺 Microsoft Cloud Network and M365 Data Center Performance

Let’s begin with the client device as the cornerstone for analysis. It is the starting point where a Microsoft Teams call is being triggered and it is the device itself where audio, video, and screen-sharing happens. Capturing telemetry data from the user endpoints while a call is running is essential to monitoring and analyzing call quality.

Many Microsoft Teams call quality issues have a direct correlation with slow device performance. Whether it is high CPU utilization or high memory usage or an old Bluetooth headset, the client telemetry data from a user endpoint will provide the necessary insights for troubleshooting. And it’s NOT just about identifying the area related to the problem (i.e.  High CPU or Memory Usage ), it’s really about spotlighting what is causing the problem.

This comes from monitoring what processes and applications are running on the endpoint computer (i.e.  Open Applications, Background Processes, Disc I/O ). Having the viewpoint from the end-user experience is of utmost importance when trying to find the root cause of the problem for Microsoft Teams call quality performance issues.

With the detailed telemetry data showing what exactly was happening on that device during a Microsoft Teams call will save hours of research time for IT technical support. A 2022  survey from over 100 enterprise organizations showed that 41% of respondents estimated that it was taking between 4 and 8 hours to troubleshoot and resolve Microsoft Teams performance issues .

The next important set of metrics to gather and build a clear picture for Teams call quality analytics is related to network performance. Voice and Video calls all pass through multiple network levels including:

• Local home office, business building, or corporate VPN
• Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

Every one of these levels can influence the quality of your Microsoft Teams calls. The first level is completely under your control (either by the employee or by the IT department supporting the office building), BUT the other one is not. We recently published a  blog where we analyzed the importance of the ISP connections  and how they can have a negative impact on Teams call quality.

Another reason why you should monitor the network closely is to identify the number of routing hops until users are connected to the Microsoft cloud. Employees residing in the same geographic area may be connecting to different Microsoft data centers to access the company tenant. Monitoring how many hops are included in the networking trip, and what the termination point is for tenant access, will help provide useful insights to troubleshoot issues before they are reported to the helpdesk.

This type of proactive analysis and remediation is extremely valuable today. According to a recent  Forrester research study from May 2022 , many  users will never contact the IT service desk.  If they experience performance problems on their computers or with their cloud-based services like Microsoft Teams, they will just continue to suffer in silence. They won’t report the problem and their issues will linger, forever. This puts the responsibility on the IT operations group to proactively identify those users and troubleshoot their problems.

Important metrics for monitoring and troubleshooting network health include the following:

• Upload / Download speeds
• Connection Type (wired or wireless)
• WiFi Signal Strength
• VPN Routing (if any is configured)
• Packet Loss
• Jitter / Latency
• Routing Hops
• Peering Distance to Microsoft Cloud
• Round-Trip Times for data traffic (RTT)

This brings us to the final segment in the end-to-end monitoring journey for Teams voice/video traffic, namely the Microsoft network and cloud-based data center. To build the true picture of end-user experience for Teams call quality there are some crucial metrics that need to be gathered for full transparency on the Microsoft side. Together these provide the details to perform accurate end-to-end call quality analytics for Microsoft Teams.

The specific metrics needed to monitor and measure the health of the M365 cloud service for Microsoft Teams include the following:

• Teams Service Uptime and Availability
• Location of M365 Data Center Processing the Teams Call / Video Meeting Traffic
• Authentication Speed for Cloud Access
• Teams Service Execution Time (login, chat, messages, presence)
• Network Round-Trip Times (RTT)

The OfficeExpert TrueDEM technology from panagenda provides end-to-end visibility of all the details required for doing complete analytics on Teams voice/video calls and meetings, including Microsoft Teams Rooms. The SaaS solution gathers performance metrics from each of the three zones described in this Blog and enables you to proactively resolve Microsoft Teams performance issues. You can quickly spotlight underperforming, legacy computers that have been known to cause problems. Dashboards showcase which users have poor performance on their home networks, or slow ISP response times.

OfficeExpert also integrates data points from the  Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard (CQD)  to help group calls with issues under Microsoft’s four categories (Jitter, Packet Loss, Round-Trip Time, and Ratio of Concealed Samples). By providing visibility into all the components involved in Teams call quality, OfficeExpert helps organizations diagnose and triage Microsoft Teams performance issues before they become chronic problems. A huge benefit comes from the dynamic interface which allows IT operations to drill down and analyze exactly what was happening during each segment of a Teams call/meeting, isolate the respective issues, and then identify a fix. There is no use of ambiguous averages for call quality measurements. Instead, OfficeExpert provides the hard truths, using accurate second-by-second telemetry data, helping IT support groups address issues head-on.

The five main benefits provided by OfficeExpert TrueDEM include the following:

• Faster Root Cause Analysis and Troubleshooting for Teams Call Quality Issues
• Proactive Remediation for Chronic Problems (i.e. problematic background process running during calls, VPN routing issues, etc.)
• Optimize Employee Hardware and Home Network Provisioning
• Identify Underperforming ISP’s in Employee Locations
• Early Detection of Microsoft Cloud Outages

If you are interested in learning more about our OfficeExpert TrueDEM solution and how it can help you detect, prioritize, resolve, and prevent Microsoft Teams performance issues and alert your IT operations group about Microsoft 365 outages, please visit our website and download some of our information or watch one of our recorded webinars.

Webinar:  Your CEO’s Microsoft Teams Calls Keep Dropping! What do you do?

White Paper:  Digital Experience Monitoring and Troubleshooting for Microsoft Teams

If you would like to sign-up for a free trial of OfficeExpert for your organization, you can make that request at  https://www.panagenda.com/produts/officeexpert/

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About the Author

Marketing professional with 17 years’ experience working in the Microsoft ecosystem focusing mainly on UCC technologies.

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It’s Here! Monitor Microsoft Teams Audio Video Conferencing

• September 15, 2021

Alex Tsukernik

Exoprise released its long awaited Teams Audio Video Conferencing sensor. This sensor fully tests Audio/Video end-to-end capacity, throughput, and network performance through the actual underlying Microsoft Teams and Azure infrastructure .

The Teams AV sensor provides deep insight into a network’s capability to handle the Teams/Skype Unified Communications (UC) platform.  Desktop, Collaboration and Network administrators can now easily diagnose and proactively plan a Microsoft Teams rollout and migration.

Microsoft Teams relies on WebRTC and Exoprise captures low-level network characteristics without the need for SSL inspection or complex Netflow instrumentation. The Teams AV Conferencing sensor relies on a hosted media bot to proactively test and monitor low-level the UC workflow, Audio, and Video streams in real-time.

Use the Teams AV sensor for accurate networking testing as recommended for deploying and assessing network capacity for Microsoft Teams according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Teams Built Atop WebRTC

Microsoft Teams, both for regular browsers and their Teams App relies on WebRTC for audio and video communications. WebRTC is a free and open standard that provides browsers and mobile apps with the ability to perform Real-Time Communications (RTC) via simple JavaScript compatible APIs. The WebRTC project is supported by Google, Mozilla, and now with the announcement of Microsoft Edge to be based off of Chrome/Chromium, also by Microsoft.

WebRTC is responsible for the various workflows involved in establishing real-time communications between peers or to central servers. It utilizes many standards such as Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) and Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) for discovering and optimizing the connections. Once network discovery is complete, WebRTC handles the required signaling and session establishment protocols such as JSEP, ICE, SIP, SDP, NAT and UDP/TCP. We help you ascertain the suitability of WebRTC in your LAN/WAN environment.

As opposed to the legacy Skype for Business protocols, WebRTC is an open standard that can more easily be supported on mobile clients or Linux desktops. Hurrah!

Skype Transition to Microsoft Teams

At the end of July, Microsoft announced that the Skype for Business Online Service will be ending on July 31, 2021 and that Microsoft is encouraging its customers to use the Microsoft Teams service instead.

The writing was on this wall for sometime. On-premises Skype for Business Server will exist for some time but Microsoft is putting its full weight behind Microsoft Teams. Thankfully, Exoprise has arrived with its Microsoft Teams monitoring solutions in the nick of time. Now, armed with a cadre of CloudReady Teams, Teams Audio Video sensors , and VoIP sensors Unified Communications administrators can properly baseline, test, and evaluate their network for Microsoft Teams performance.

Watch Our Video on How To Monitor Microsoft Teams

How Exoprise Monitor’s Microsoft Teams

Deploying and setting up an Exoprise Teams AV Conferencing Sensor is easy. Because the sensor utilizes an Azure-hosted Teams Bot to stream audio and video into a client conference call, it doesn’t require a peer-to-peer setup like the Exoprise Skype sensors. However, it does require more maintenance and infrastructure from the team at Exoprise.

Easy Deployment

All that’s required for setting up a Teams AV Conference sensor is a Teams account and one-time administrative access to the tenant so that it can accept an Exoprise OAuth registration for the Bot to join the meaning. Accepting the OAuth registration currently requires Tenant administrative rights but the OAuth registration only needs to happen once for the entire tenant. See the following screenshots for reference:

Configure A CloudReady Teams AV Conferencing Sensor:

• Supply the credentials for a valid account within your tenant. This can be a managed or federated account – the sensor supports both and both types of accounts should be tested.
• Optionally, if you supply a specific team then you must create the team first and make sure that the account is a member of the team. If you leave it blank, then the account must have permission to create a team. It will create a team in the form of exoprise_test_team(account_name). This is detailed in the introduction (please read!).
• For step 3, if you’ve already accepted our  Teams AV Bot OAuth registration, then you can just select it from the drop down list. You may have other domains within your tenant so choose the correct registration that corresponds to the domain of the test account.
• If this is your first time setting up a Teams AV Sensor, then you will need to accept our OAuth registration and you’ll need an account that has administrative access just to accept the OAuth registration. You don’t need an admin account for the sensor access, just for the one time registration acceptance. Supply a registration label and click ‘Add New’. You’ll see a normal Azure AD popup to accept our OAuth registration like the following screenshot.

That’s it. That is all it takes to configure a Teams AV Conferencing sensor and begin monitoring end-to-end Microsoft Teams network performance. Once you proceed to the next step, your configuration will be validated and then onto deployment to a CloudReady private sites you’ve deployed.

Diagnose Microsoft Teams Audio Video Performance Issues

Once you deploy a Microsoft Teams AV Sensor, it will create conference sessions (Meet Now) and invite the Exoprise AV bot to join. When the Bot joins it starts streaming audio and video content into the conference which the sensor monitors. High level actions and low-level WebRTC metrics about the session, network and performance of the audio and video content are aggregated for analysis and alarming. Below are metric details and how they are used to diagnose and baseline Microsoft Teams performance on your network:

Audio / Video Streams

The streaming of audio and video from the Exoprise AV bot is monitored from the WebRTC perspective and a compliment of statistics is captured:

• Max Audio Jitter The maximum audio jitter as perceived by the client is sampled and recorded once a second and aggregated for the session. Jitter , or network jitter , is the variance in time delay in milliseconds (ms) between data packets over a network . The technical term for jitter is “packet delay variance”. Generally, you want the maximum audio jitter to be below 20ms but periodic  spikes in the 20ms-30ms with average jitter in the single digits is acceptable.
• Mean (Avg) Audio Jitter Avg audio jitter is the aggregate average over the life of the session. You definitely want to see this value below 20ms or your users conference experience will be poor. Average jitter values of 20ms or higher and higher spikes in Max Jitter will indicate poor network quality for Microsoft Teams.
• Audio Packet Loss Percentage audio packet loss in either audio or video channels is very detrimental to the experience of a conference or meeting. Audio packets are smaller and more monotonic, so if you see audio packet loss it is a strong indicator of poor networking and congestion.

Comparing any of these metrics to the CloudReady crowd helps you in pinpointing the problem. If the crowd metrics are exhibiting the same patterns as your own sensors, that points to a shared problem with Teams or Azure infrastructure. If the your deployed sensors are only experiencing detrimental affects then the problem is localized to your own networks or where the sensor is deployed.

• Video Packet Loss Sessions with elevated video packet loss will have jumpy or missed video frames. Video packets are larger and more consumptive within the transport so more video packet loss spikes are common. Most AV protocols and codecs, including WebRTC, prioritize audio channels over video because it is more detrimental to have audio drop than lost video frames.
• Audio & Video Bitrate Lower streaming bitrates are also an indicator of poor conference networking. Most AV transports and codecs try to maintain a consistent bitrate or Bits-Per-Second (bps). If the Teams client can’t sustain a healthy bitrate then it will have make up for lost packets with frame skipping, audio cutouts,  or attempting to synthesize the lost bits (error correction). You should see a consistent audio bitrate and a more variable video bitrate (they’re bigger packets and less prioritized).

Of interest for advanced telemetry in the Teams AV sensor is NACK, FIR and PLI packets. These special WebRTC transport packets are generated used in response to poor networking conditions and the detection of dropped frames or audio samples. Basically, the client sends a “reset” to the server or peer and requests that the missing bits or frames are resent or re-synchronized. If these event occurrences are sustained then you have some poor networking on your hands.

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Meeting Connection

The metrics on the Meeting Connection tab cover the overall quality of the connection for the conference to the actual Microsoft Teams hosting infrastructure.

• Max RTT The maximum round-trip time (RTT) is a measure of latency as perceived by the WebRTC client throughout the session. Every real-time connection (RTC) stack utilizes protocol headers, fields and control packets to evaluate round-trip times during sessions for quickly determining when the streams may be out of sync or underlying QoS issues. Max RTT is the maximum round-trip time that was seen during the session. Sustained Max RTT rates above 300ms between the client and the edge/media servers will reflect a poor conferencing experience.
• Avg RTT This is the average round-trip time seen during the session. For good audio/visual conferencing experience you want this Avg RTT to be below 100ms but, ideally, below 50ms.

Teams QoS and Media Quality

• Video Frames Per Second Dropped Frames dropped per second indicate the video frames during the conference are dropped per second. Depending on the network quality, and the negotiated video frame size,  this number can be higher than expected. The video playback will skip frames and the WebRTC stack will try to compensate for the lost video frames during the session. Also, audio delivery is prioritized over video delivery, the audio samples are smaller, more constant and consistent in packet size.
• Video Frames Per Second Received This is a measure of the video frames received and rendered during the Video conference. Currently, the Exoprise AV Bot will choose and downgrade video frame sizes depending on the end-to-end quality of the connection.
• Audio Sample Rate Audio samples are sent in 20 millisecond packets and are prioritized over video samples.

Login & Render, Page Layout & Connect Times

The Microsoft Teams AV Sensor includes metrics for the underlying page navigation, login, authentication, and connection times. Aggregate metrics for the underlying TCP/IP Connection and SSL Timings are also captured for each sensor run. This is an aggregate sample of everything it takes to get into a Microsoft Teams meeting including signing in and starting a meet-now conference session.

Sample Screenshots of the Teams AV Sensor

It wouldn’t be an Exoprise blog post without the requisite set of screenshots. We believe in presenting screenshots and examples to show prospects and customers that our platform and technology are real. There’s no magical hand-waving when it comes to seeing our sensors in action. Try the new Microsoft Teams Audio Video Conferencing see what you see for yourself.

Audio Video Media Stream Metrics including Jitter, Packet Loss, Correction and Bitrate for Teams AV Conferencing

TCP/IP latency, SSL Negotiation and general Network metrics for Microsoft Teams

Teams Conferencing QoS Metrics

Login, authentication and render times for Teams Conferencing

Teams Client Document, Page Loading and Rendering

Teams Conferencing Latency, SSL and Connection Times

Monitor Microsoft Teams Web Client Meeting Quality

What you read till now was about synthetics. And with everyone working from home these days, IT needs to monitor Teams’ performance from an end-user perspective. So, while synthetic agents can proactively detect Microsoft teams outages, you also need a comprehensive strategy to monitor remote employee digital experience with Teams and get the best SaaS experience.

Real user monitoring (RUM) of Microsoft Teams web app client with Service Watch Browser helps your team accomplish this goal by collecting the following metrics.

• Web Experience Score (WXS) This quantifiable score is an overall indicator of the experience health and well-being of a remote worker using a web app.
• Navigation Total The time it takes to load a particular page.
• Resource Tota When a page loads, so do its resources. Resource Total measures the time for all the resources to download.
• Input Delay The time before a page starts responding to user input.
• Page Jump The amount a page shifts when it’s loading.
• Page Paint The time it takes for the page to render its largest element.

Optimize the Microsoft Teams Desktop App Performance in Real-time

Is the Microsoft Teams desktop app down? I am sure you think about this question when there is an issue or outage with Microsoft 365. And that question frightens you as you have a large distributed workforce to manage.

In our recent press release, Exoprise addresses the application network visibility gap with the latest digital experience monitoring solution , we address how IT can leverage our unique application network score to identify poor-performing Desktop apps like Teams.

Network admins and app owners can instantly gain end-to-end visibility into the response time and performance of Teams TCP network traffic with Service Watch Desktop . The tool pinpoints the root cause of slow network apps such as Wi-Fi strength, VPN connection, backend composite resources (memory, CPU, disk), etc. You can also diagnose the fault behind the Microsoft Teams crash for any teams user by checking all the system events under the ‘reliability’ tab.

Service Watch Desktop like Service Watch Browser provides a Desktop Experience Score (DXS). IT can prioritize end-users that have a lower digital experience score and fix issues quickly to deliver the best Desktop experience. 

Read more in our blog on how a digital experience score optimizes the workplace .

There’ More. How to Monitor UDP Traffic for Microsoft Teams

Exoprise recently introduced the industry’s first new “Network Digital Experience Monitoring” feature to monitor UDP network traffic for all VoIP, streaming, and unified communications apps including Teams. You can read the press release here . We are the ONLY vendor that can perform hop-by-hop analysis for all the streaming apps such as Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, and more.

If your business uses UDP with Microsoft Teams for video calls and meetings, worry not. The latest release from Service Watch Desktop measures response time, packet loss, latency, and jitter to provide an optimal network quality of experience (QoE) to end-users. IT professionals have advanced visibility into each hop performance and accurately pinpoint bottlenecks leading to poor Teams desktop app performance.

Complete Digital Experience Monitoring for Microsoft Teams

We can provide you with a free Digital Experience Monitoring tool for Microsoft Teams . Check out our new page that covers both synthetics and real user monitoring of Teams in detail.

Your team can easily deploy, try, and start collecting insights for your remote and hyrid workforce today. Managing the Teams performance shouldn’t be difficult. Our customer, BCD Travel , is using Exoprise for the same, so shouldn’t you?

We are here to assist you!

Get in Touch for a Custom Demo

Learn how you can improve employee digital experience with browser synthetics and endpoint monitoring. Get a custom demo to see how we synthetically monitor Microsoft 365 with CloudReady as well as real user monitoring with Service Watch.

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Alex Tsukernik is a lead architect for Exoprise and loves traversing high-level server architectures to low-level instrumentation details in a single bound.

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Dimensions and measurements available in Call Quality Dashboard (CQD)

• 31 contributors
• Applies to: Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams

The Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online allows you to understand the quality of calls made with these services. This article describes the dimensions and measurements visible through CQD. To learn more about CQD, see Use CQD to manage call and meeting quality in Microsoft Teams .

First and Second endpoint classification

Many of the dimensions and measurements in CQD are labeled as first or second. The following logic determines which endpoint involved in the stream or call is labeled as first:

• A server endpoint (AV MCU, Mediation Server, and so on) is considered first when a server is involved in the stream or call.
• A client endpoint is considered second unless the stream is between two server endpoints.
• If both endpoints are the same type, first versus second is set based on internal ordering of the user agent category to ensure that the ordering is consistent.

In the following example, each row represents a pair of User Agents involved in a stream:

That first and second classification is separate from which endpoint is the caller or callee. The First Is Caller dimension can be used to help identify which endpoint is the caller or callee.

Dimensions information is based in part on data uploaded to the CQD portal. Many Dimension values can also be used as filters.

Dimension data types and units

Boolean values are always either True or False. In some cases, True can be represented as 1, and False can be represented as 0.

Dimensions that are provided as range or group of values are shown using the following format:

<sort order string> [<lower bound inclusive> - <upper bound exclusive>

For example, the Duration (Minutes) dimension represents the call duration in seconds with the value reported as a range of values.

The <sort order string> is used to control the sort order when presenting the data and can be used for filtering. For example, a filter on Duration (Minutes) < "065", would show streams with duration less than 2 minutes (The leading '0' is needed for the filter to work as expected). The actual value of the sort order string isn't significant.

You might notice ranges that seem to be invalid for a given dimension. An example is Wifi Signal Strength showing calls in the 082: [100 - 110) range when 100 is the maximum possible value. This range is due to how numbers are assigned to ranges in CQD's data model. If a whole number value is 99, it's counted in the 081: [90 - 100) range. If that value is 100, it's counted in the 082: [100 - 110) range. This doesn't indicate that there are Wifi Signal Strength values greater than 100% being reported.

Enumeration strings

Strings used by CQD are often derived from data files, and these strings can be any combination of character within the allowed length. Some dimensions look like strings, but since they can only be one of a short list of predefined values, they're enumerations and not true strings. Some enumerations strings are also used in pairs.

Enumeration pair

Dimensions that are provided as an enumeration pair are shown using the following format:

<enumeration value from one end point> : <enumeration value from the other endpoint>

The ordering of the enumeration values is consistent but doesn't reflect ordering of the first or second endpoints.

For example, the Network Connection Detail Pair shows the Network Connection Detail values for the two endpoints:

Blank values

The table below describes why a dimension might be blank. Many dimensions and measurements are blank if the QoE Record Available dimension is false. Missing QoE typically occurs when the call isn't successfully established, or when the client fails to send its telemetry to the service.

Available dimensions

The following table lists the dimensions currently available in CQD, in the order listed in the Query Editor used to create reports or edit previously defined reports.

Measurements

Many Measurement values can also be used as filters. The following table lists the measurements currently available in CQD, shown in the order listed in the Query Editor

Notes on measurements

Accuracy limitations.

Certain user and call count measurements rely on performing a distinct countif operation on the data set to compute the count. There's currently an up to 0.2% error inherent with the distinct countif operation depending on the number of rows the operation is performed on. For the most accurate volume, use stream count measures, which don't rely on this distinct countif operation. Filtering to reduce the data volume might reduce the error, but might not eliminate the source of the error in distinct call and user counts. More information about this limitation can be found here dcount aggregate function .

You can use many Dimension and Measurement values as filters. You can use filters in your query to eliminate information in the same way you'd select a Dimension or Measurement to add or include information in the query.

Related articles

Improve and monitor call quality for Teams

What is CQD?

Set up Call Quality Dashboard (CQD)

Upload tenant and building data

CQD data and reports

Use CQD to manage call and meeting quality

Stream Classification in CQD

Use Power BI to analyze CQD data

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The Automated Aggregator for Microsoft Services

Introducing Microsoft Teams Real-time Call Quality Analytics

With the release of Real-Time Call Quality Analytics (RTA) to public preview September 30th, Microsoft Teams is now able to provide real-time call quality statistics for scheduled meetings in a centralized administrative console, something that has never previously been available in prior iterations of Microsoft meeting platforms.

Situations can arise where immediate analysis of a scheduled meeting is required and waiting until it has concluded is not an option. The Real Time Call Quality Analytics dashboard is able to provide administrators and support teams the following information when immediate (real-time) assistance is required.

• Meeting Participants
• Join & Leave Time
• Microsoft Teams Room (Surface Hub, Teams Display, Collaboration Bar)
• Microsoft Teams IP Phones
• Changes in connectivity type (Wired to WiFi or WiFi to WWAN)
• Changes in IP addresses pertaining to connectivity change
• Network Metrics (Jitter, Packet Loss, Round Trip Time)
• Audio, Video and Application Sharing (Bitrate, Frame Rate)

*Available only for internal users

Several of my customers in the financial services industry have been able to leverage the RTA dashboard to identify and assist with meetings that were experiencing “issues”. While active conferences, the support teams were able to identify specific users experiencing either packet loss or latency that exceeded tolerable thresholds . Once they knew which users were causing or experiencing the poor quality, they were able to chat with those users over Teams to run through remediation activities real time.

Customer quotes:

• “This is a HUGE improvement and very useful, nice work!”
• “Real-time telemetry is something we’ve been eagerly awaiting in Teams. It’s a leap forward in being able to support our users when they are experiencing issues.”

RTA is available for public consumption through the end of 2021. If you haven’t checked it out yet or used it for diagnosing a problematic conference, you should!

Using the RTA Dashboard

No additional steps need to be taken at the tenant level to enable the RTA feature. That said, any account that will be accessing the RTA dashboard will need to be a member of at least one of the following RBAC roles.

• M365 Global Admin
• M365 Global Reader
• Teams Administrator
• Teams Communications Support Specialist
• Teams Communications Support Engineer

With the proper permissions allocated to the support teams, where do we go from here? To the Teams Admin Center (TAC) of course!

Once logged into the TAC, browse to the Users -> Manage Users section.

Menu options will vary based on the permissions assigned to your account. Two different views are shown above, the left with Global Administrator, the right with a more restrictive role.

Navigate to the Meetings & Calls section. All meetings from the past 24 hours will be displayed here, including meetings that are in-progress.

From here there, either the Meeting ID can be selected to show metrics for the user currently selected, or the participants can be selected to show high level call telemetry for all parties in the call.

If the problematic user is known, navigating to that users’ view makes sense. Otherwise, some analysis may be required to find the problematic party.

Participants View

When selecting the participants, we are presented with the following information:

• Meeting Participants that reside in the tenant
• Join and Leave Times
• Participation Duration
• Regional Location
• Network Type
• Connection Type

In the example below, the details outlined in orange show the user has joined the meeting from multiple devices as indicated by the secondary line underneath the name and picture. We can see that the endpoints for this user have disparate IP addresses indicating they are connected to different networks as well. The second user listed also appears to have been joined with multiple devices, though we can see one left the meeting before the other participants.

If users are experiencing high levels of packet loss, it will be shown on this page. This piece of information can be used as a starting point to troubleshoot a meeting when minimal background was provided. The image below shows a user outlined in red that will later be referred to in the User view. The User view can be entered from this page by clicking on the Join Time for the user in question, instead of having to go through the search method. 

In the user view we can see Audio (Inbound & Outbound), Application Sharing (Inbound & Outbound), and Outbound Video telemetry for the selected account over the duration the user was in the conference.

Data is collected and displayed for each active modality in the conference as a dot on the respective line graph every 10 seconds. Each data point can be hovered over to provide numeric values for the metric being displayed along with a time stamp.

By default, the graphs will display the last 2 minutes of the conference, whether active or ended. The time period displayed in the graph can be adjusted by using the sliders, outlined in green, below the graph. Video and Application Sharing follow the same layout for their sliders.

Once the problematic period is identified, focus in on 2-3 minutes around the event.

Note: The full meeting duration will be available once the conference has ended. While a conference is active, only the past 20 minutes are available to maneuver through. Conferences exceeding three hours will only have the last three hours available for review in RTA once the conference concludes.

On the inbound stream we are presented with Jitter and packet loss telemetry. The outbound stream presents Round Trip Time and Bitrate. In this conference, we can see that Siunie experienced some inbound packet loss, which is automatically shown as a red line where tolerable thresholds are exceeded.

If we navigate to the person previously identified as experiencing Packet Loss in the Participant view, we can see additional details related to the event. When hovering over the event in question below, we can see that there was a change in IP address and Location. A change in networks will typically cause some level of temporary degradation. This level of Packet Loss can typically be associated with loss of, or a choppy experience for the modality experiencing issues. In this case it wouldn’t be surprising to hear the user state there was an audio issue.

All metrics available for each modality are displayed by default for each graph, though individual metrics can be hidden by clicking on them in legend below each chart. For example, if only Jitter is a concern click on Packet Loss so that only Jitter is displayed.

We are also able to see when a user switches networks while on a call as indicated by the yellow triangle on the timeline. It is expected that users will experience a “blip” or quick reconnect while the network switch occurs.

The image below shows a user that was repeatedly switching between WiFi and WWAN connections. Significant Packet Loss occurred right after the switch, which would have caused audio issues while in the call. We can see an Android device was used to participate in the meeting, so we can make an educated guess that this person was likely “on the go” during the network switching events.

When reviewing video streams, only the Outbound stream details will be displayed. This is expected as Teams inbound video is not a single stream. Network events will be displayed in this chart similar to the other modalities though.

Application Sharing will show inbound or outbound metrics depending on whether the person is receiving the share or is the presenter. This should be the go-to spot when screen sharing is not performing as expected. The images below show what the metrics look like for a viewer and presenter. There can only be one presenter at any given time, so only one of the Application Sharing charts will be displaying data points based whether that user is sharing or viewing.

What’s Next

Now that RTA has been released to commercial tenants, we have the following enhancements on the roadmap for tentative release in H1 2022.

• Government clouds: GCC, GCC-High and DOD Tenants
• 3-Day data retention, expanding on the current 24 hours
• Support for Web Clients (Chrome and Edge)
• Wifi network band and signal strength
• Capture and Render Device Info and Mid-call changes
• Battery, CPU Usage & Frequency
• Server Reflexive IP
• Protocol (TCP vs. UDP) for each stream
• Meeting reliability – Join Failures, mid-call failures
• RTA based on Role Type (Presenter/Attendee)
• Streaming Attendee Analytics
• Sorting, Filtering, Searching, Exporting
• Real-time monitoring and alerting
• Aggregated multi-user grouping and data support
• More information in the Participants view
• Real-time alerts for defined users experiencing quality issues (Exec or C-Level)

Date: 2021-11-02 04:50:59Z Link: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-microsoft-teams-real-time-call-quality-analytics/ba-p/2912146

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How to Improve Your Network to Meet Microsoft Teams Requirements

This entry is part of our series on Microsoft Teams Performance monitoring . In this article, we will check how you can improve your network in order to reach MS Teams’ requirements. Of course, before doing anything to improve your network, you should deploy Robot Users in your critical locations to see and understand the impact of the changes you want to implement on your end-user experience. You need to make sure that you’re not spending your time and money for very little to no results. For more information about how the Robot Users are providing you with end-user experience metrics, please read this article >>

Get your guide and take the immediate steps to optimize the Microsoft Teams experience. Free to download!

Following along to learn how you can improve your network to meet the Microsoft Teams requirements.

Distance and Egress Point

To improve your network performance, you can first try to remove the impact of geographical distance. For example, do not use a European-based Office 365 tenant to connect users that are in Singapore. The Microsoft Network has over 160 Edge locations worldwide. Therefore, Microsoft highly recommends that your company sites and the Microsoft Edges are on the same continent and as close as they can be. You should also always have your users connecting directly to the Microsoft network as fast as they can. It means to ban any redirection to headquarter before breaking out to the internet. The Microsoft network will always be faster than your ISP to connect to your tenant. So, a user in Singapore should directly break out on the internet in Singapore connecting to a Microsoft Singapore tenant in order to minimize any possible latency. It provides examples, tests and results on how your network configuration impacts the overall network ability to handle Office 365 workloads.

Avoiding Unnecessary Infrastructure Layers

It means that Microsoft recommends that you avoid using a company proxy before reaching out to the Internet. With the same philosophy, you should exclude Microsoft 365 URLs using PAC files to send Microsoft 365 to a firewall. Finally, you should prevent the use of a VPN tunnel. As you may know the Teams traffic is already encrypted with TLS and media workloads are encrypted with Secure Real Time Protocol. So, the use of a VPN will just add another encryption, additional network hops, and finally greatly affects the end-user performance increasing Jitter, packet loss and latency.

Sites Education and Optimization

User education is important. It is important to tell users in advance what they can expect, what kind of issues they can encounter and the process you have in place to address these issues. People are usually less likely to complain if they know in advance what can be expected. Also, you can explain the performance they lose they gain in flexibility (working from anywhere, being connected to Office 365 wherever they are, etc.).It is also important to educate users on best practices and provide them with certified equipment. A very simple best practice, for example, is to make sure they are using cable whenever they can rather than a wireless connection. Regarding equipment, you should know that even the devices that capture and render the signal (such as headset or webcams) have great impact on the final quality because of their inner latency to process the audio stream. That is why it worth testing with certified Teams equipment to see if it provides a better end-user experience.

Enabling QoS (or Class of Service) on Your infrastructure

It means that backup traffic or conference traffic have the same priority even if the later is more critical in terms of speed. You can change that enabling the QoS on your infrastructure:

In the usual infrastructure, all packets are handled the same way by your network.

• On your managed external WANs
• On your managed internal LANs
• On your enterprise based Wi-Fi networks

For that you must:

• Deployed TCP/UDP Audio in the EF Queue (Expedite forwarding – DSCP 46)
• Deployed TCP.UDO video in the AF41 queue (Assured Forwarding – DSCP 34)
• Deployed TCP/UDP Application/Desktop Sharing in the AF21 queue (Assured Forwarding –DSCP 19)

Read more about  implementing quality of Service (QoS) dor MS Teams.

Investigating Network Performance Issues

Another way of optimizing your network without spending too much money upfront is to try to understand the root cause of potential test failures.

• A high “One-way latency” is often related to an incorrect routing setup. Therefore, you should investigate packet routing and implement an ideal route (see above).
• If the roundtrip time is higher than double the latency, it is certainly that one leg of the path is incorrectly routed. It can come from multiple causes such as a firewall issue or a bad router configuration. In any case, you should investigate your traffic path.
• A high packet loss is often a sign of bandwidth issues. The best thing to do is then check your available bandwidth and compare it with the Microsoft bandwidth calculator (see next section). It can also be linked with a wrong DSCP configuration.
• A high Jitter is usually a result of high packet loss. So you’re back to investigating the issue above.
• A high burst rate loss is a result of under provisioning or misconfigured queuing that you should then investigate.
• A low Network MOS is directly linked to either a high Jitter, packet loss or latency. You can calculate the MOS degradation factor that highlights which of these statistics are responsible for that situation and hence gives you an idea of what to investigate.

Finally, you must work on your bandwidth. You can calculate what you need thanks to the Microsoft bandwidth calculator available here >>

Calculating the bandwidth required, and the one you have an available site per site should be your first task when you assess your readiness for MS Teams. The bandwidth will greatly affect all the other network metrics while using Teams services. If your site fails and you know that your bandwidth is currently limited, you should consider contacting your ISP and negotiate increase. Sometimes it is possible at reasonable costs and sometimes it is not. But that is something that can greatly improve your end-user experience without involving large infrastructure project costs.

Interested in learning the best way to optimize your Microsoft Teams performance? Make sure to learn more about Martello’s Microsoft Teams monitoring solution and download our eBook ‘Ensuring Teams Performance when it’s OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange Under the Hood’.

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What is round-trip time (RTT) and how to reduce it?

Round-trip time (RTT) is the time it takes for the server to receive a data packet, process it, and send the client an acknowledgement that the request has been received. It is measured from the time the signal is sent till the response is received.

When a user clicks a button on a website, the request is sent to the server as a data packet. The server needs time (RTT) to process the data, generate a response, and send it back. Each action, like sending a form upon a click, may require multiple requests.

RTT determines the total network latency and helps monitor the state of data channels. A user cannot communicate with the server in less than one RTT, and the browser requires at least three round trip times to initiate a connection:

• to resolve the DNS name;
• to configure the TCP connection;
• to send an HTTP request and receive the first byte.

In some latency-sensitive services, e.g., online games, the RTT is shown on the screen.

• Factors affecting RTT

Distance and number of intermediate nodes. A node is a single device on the network that sends and receives data. The first node is the user’s computer. A home router or routers at the district, city, or country level are often intermediate nodes. The longer the distance between the client and server, the more intermediate nodes the data must pass through and the higher the RTT.

Server and intermediate node congestion. For example, a request may be sent to a fully loaded server that is concurrently processing other requests. It can’t accept this new request until other ones are processed, which increases the RTT. The RTT includes the total time spent on sending and processing a request at each hop, so if one of the intermediate nodes is overloaded, the RTT adds up.

You never know exactly to what extent the RTT will grow based on how the infrastructure is loaded; it depends on individual data links, intermediate node types, hardware settings, and underlying protocols.

Physical link types and interferences. Physical data channels include copper, fiber optic, and radio channels. The RTT here is affected by the amount of interference. On the Wi-Fi operating frequency, the noise and other signals interfere with the useful signals, which reduces the number of packets per second. So, the RTT is likely to increase over Wi-Fi than over fiber-optics.

• How to calculate RTT using ping

To measure the RTT, you can run the ping command in the command line, e.g., “ping site.com.”

Requests will be sent to the server using ICMP. Their default number is four, but it can be adjusted. The system will record the delayed time between sending each request and receiving a response and display it in milliseconds: minimum, maximum, and average.

The ping command shows the total RTT value. If you want to trace the route and measure the RTT at each individual node, you can use the tracert command (or traceroute for Linux or Mac OS). It is also can be performed via the command line.

• Normal RTT values

Many factors affect RTT, making it difficult to establish a normal—the smaller the number, the better.

In online games, over 50 milliseconds are noticeable: players cannot accurately hit their targets due to network latency. Pings above 200 milliseconds matter even when users browse news feeds or place online orders: many pages open slowly and not always fully. A buyer is more likely to leave a slow website without making a purchase and never come back, which is what 79 percent of users do .

Let’s compare the pings of the two sites—the US jewelry store Fancy and the German news portal Nachrichtenleicht.de . We will ping them from Germany.

The RTT of a German news portal is almost three times lower than that of a US store because we ping from Germany. There are fewer nodes between the user and the server, which are both in the same country, so the RTT is lower.

• How to reduce RTT

Connect to a content delivery network (CDN). The hosting provider’s servers are usually located in the same region where most of the audience lives. But if the audience of the site grows or changes geographically, and content is requested by users who are far away from the server, RTT increases for them, and the site loading speed is slower. To increase the loading speed, use a CDN.

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a service that caches (mostly static) content and stores it on servers in different regions. Therefore, only dynamic content is downloaded from the main source server, which is far from the user. Heavy static files—the main share of the website—are downloaded from the nearest CDN server, which reduces the RTT by up to 50 percent.

For example, the client requests content from a CDN-connected site. The resource recognizes that there is a caching server in the user’s region and that it has a cached copy of the requested content. To speed up the loading, the site substitutes links to files so that they are retrieved not from the hosting provider’s servers, but from the caching server instead since it is located closer. If the content is not in the cache, CDN downloads it directly from the hosting server, passes it to the user, and stores it in the cache. Now a client on the same network can request the resource from another device and load the content faster without having refer to the origin server.

Also, CDN is capable of load balancing: it routes requests through redundant servers if the load on the closest one is too high.

Optimize content and server apps. If your website has visitors from different countries/regions, you need a CDN to offset the increased RTT caused by long distances. In addition, the RTT is affected by the request processing time, which can be improved by the below content optimizations:

• Audit website pages for unnecessary scripts and functions, reduce them, if possible.
• Combine and simplify external CSS.
• Combine JavaScript files and use async/await keywords to optimize their processing—the HTML code first, the script later.
• Use JS and CSS for individual page types to reduce load times.
• Use the tag instead of @import url (“style.css”) commands .
• Use advanced compression media technologies: WebP for images, HEVC for video.
• Use CSS-sprites: merge images into one and show its parts on the webpage. Use special services like SpriteMe.
• I want to reduce RTT with CDN. What provider to choose?

For fast content delivery anywhere in the world, you need a reliable CDN with a large number of points of presence. Try Gcore CDN —this is a next-generation content delivery network with over 140 PoPs on 5 continents, 30 ms average latency worldwide, and many built-in web security features. It will help to accelerate the dynamic and static content of your websites or applications, significantly reduce RTT, and make users satisfied.

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Kate Martin Makes First WNBA Start for Las Aces Vegas, Scores Career-High

Dustin schutte | jun 10, 2024.

• Las Vegas Aces

It didn't take long for Kate Martin to find a spot in the starting rotation. On Sunday, the Las Vegas Aces rookie made her first career start in the WNBA, as the team faced the Los Angeles Sparks.

Martin made the most of her opportunity, too. The former Iowa star scored a career-high 13 points, making five-of-seven shots from the floor. She was also converted on all three of her shots from behind the 3-point line.

Along with her 13-point night, Martin also grabbed four rebounds and had three assists. Unfortunately for the Aces, it wasn't enough to get the win. Los Angeles defeated Las Vegas 96-92.

Rookie Kate Martin is on fire in her first career start, dropping 11 PTS by halftime and going a perfect 3-3 from deep 🔥 WNBA Commissioner's Cup presented by @coinbase | LVA-LAS on League Pass pic.twitter.com/qrNoOiu9sW — WNBA (@WNBA) June 10, 2024

Even though the Aces fell short, it was still an impressive showing from Martin, who has been one of the WNBA's pleasant surprises this year. She was a second-round pick in this year's draft, but quickly earned the respect of her teammates for her basketball IQ and attitude towards the game.

Martin has appeared in eight of Las Vegas' nine games this season. She's averaging 5.1 points, 3.5 rebounds and 1.8 assists while logging just over 21 minutes per contest. The rookie is also shooting 36.1% from the floor and 39.1% from 3-point range.

In ESPN's rookie rankings, Martin ranked third, behind Sparks' Cameron Brink and Chicago Sky's Angel Reese. She's not just making an impact with her teammates, everyone watching the WNBA is taking notice of the former Hawkeyes' production.

Martin and the Aces will be back in action on Tuesday night, hosting the Minnesota Lynx. That game airs on NBA TV at 10 p.m. ET.

DUSTIN SCHUTTE

It's PIAA playoff time; See how Bucks County area softball teams fared in the first round

It's state playoff time, and eight local teams made the cut. See how they fared in first-round action of the 2024 PIAA Softball Championships.

11-1 Tri-Valley 16, 1-1 Dock Mennonite 1

The Pioneers’ successful season came to an end as they faced District 11 champions and nemesis Tri-Valley. Addison Landis was 1-for-2 with an RBI for the Pioneers, while Aubrey Gahman had a double. Sophia Mercure was 1-for-1 and scored the Pioneers’ lone run. This is the second year in a row that the Pioneers fell to District 11 powerhouse Tri-Valley in the first round. The Pioneers finished the season with a District One Class 1A title and a 16-6 record. 

1-1 Bristol 18, 12-1 MaST Charter 0

It took just three innings for the Warriors to punch their ticket to the Class 2A quarterfinals for the second straight season. Sophomore ace Brianna Slack only gave up a lone hit and walk while striking out nine, facing two batters over the minimum. Slack also provided power at the plate, hitting a home run and driving in three runs. McKenzie Newcomb also drove in three runs, while Peyton McClain was 2-for-3 with a triple and two RBIs and Grace Boyle was 2-for-2 with a double, a walk and two RBIs. 

12-1 Conwell-Egan 11, 11-1 Palisades 1

For the second year in a row, Conwell-Egan and Palisades faced each other in the first round of Class 3A. This time, the Eagles avenged last year’s season-ending loss with a definitive, six-inning victory over the Pirates. Lauren Bretzel pitched a gem, giving up just two hits and one walk in the win. Senior Molly Milewski was 3-for-4 with a double and two RBIs, while Grace Bilardo was 2-for-3 with a walk and three RBIs. Catie Russo drove in the Pirates’ lone run on an RBI double. 

Palisades concludes its season with a 19-6 record and a third straight District 11 Class 3A  title. 

12-3 Archbishop Wood 8, 3-1 Trinity 1

Jackie Cobb gave up just five hits and an unearned run while striking out five to secure the Vikings’ first-round win. Leadoff hitter Maura Yoos was perfect at the plate, going 4-for-4 and scoring three runs, while Allison Siegfried was 3-for-4 with two RBIs. Parker Kraus also drove in a pair of runs in the win. 

Best in field: From walkoffs to comebacks, these Bucks County softball, baseball players are playoff stars

1-2 Quakertown 7, 11-2 Freedom 6

The Panthers scored all seven runs in the sixth and seventh innings of a wild first-round win. Mary Wilkinson started the hit parade with a three-run home run in the sixth, cutting the deficit to 6-3. In the seventh, Leah Schwalm doubled to drive in a run, and Kira Jefferson hit an RBI double. With two outs, Cadence Jozefowski stepped to the plate and hit a two-run line drive that gave the Panthers the 7-6 walkoff win. Abbey Wagner earned the victory, giving up 10 hits and no walks against a tough Freedom offense. Schwalm and Jefferson both had three hits. 

1-3 North Penn 6, 3-2 Cumberland Valley 5

The Knights survived a scare in the bottom of the seventh to secure the win over Cumberland Valley in a game that was as close as can be. Both teams scored in the first inning, with Sophia Orth hitting an RBI single to put NP on the board. The game remained deadlocked at 1-1 until the fifth inning, when Gianna Cimino doubled to give NP a 2-1 lead. Cumberland Valley tied it in the bottom of the inning. In the seventh, Cimino hit a solo home run to give the Knights the lead. They added three more runs, which turned out to be crucial, on Orth’s RBI single and Bella Nunn’s two-run double. CV got three runs back in the bottom of the inning, but with the tying run on third base, Nunn got the final two outs with a strikeout and pop-up to secure the win. Nunn gave up seven hits and three walks while striking out 10, and two earned runs. Cimino finished 4-for-4 with a double, home run, two runs scored and two RBIs. Orth was 3-for-4 with three RBIs, and Nunn was 2-for-4.

1-5 Council Rock South 1, 11-1 Liberty 0

Lexi Waring pitched herself into the record books on Monday. The junior ace threw a three-hit shutout, giving up a single walk and striking out 11 to win an intense pitchers’ duel and the first PIAA state playoff game for CR South in school history. Kelly Delise drove in the lone run of the game in the fourth inning, with her grounder scoring Katie Aamland, who had led off the inning with a single. Aamland had two of the Golden Hawks six hits against Liberty pitcher Adelyn Smith ; she and Liberty’s Leah Onia (2-for-2) were the only players with multiple hits. 

What's Next?

Bristol, Conwell-Egan, Archbishop Wood, North Penn, Quakertown and Council Rock South advance to Thursday's quarterfinal round.

The PIAA softball quarterfinal matchups:

*Sites and times TBA.

• 1-5 Council Rock South vs. 3-3 Warwick
• 1-3 North Penn vs. 7-1 Seneca Valley
• 1-2 Quakertown vs. 3-1 Central Dauphin
• 12-3 Archbishop Wood vs. 9-1 St. Mary’s
• 12-1 Conwell-Egan vs. 4-1 Midd-West
• 1-1 Bristol vs. 4-1 South Williamsport

Boston Celtics

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⚾️ Baseball

👀 Teams with the most MCWS appearances

🐺 NC State snags final MCWS spot

Every winning moment from Supers

🫡 Saying goodbye to the Pac-12

NCAA.com | June 10, 2024

2024 ncaa baseball bracket: men's college world series scores, schedule.

The 2024 DI men's baseball tournament began with regionals on May 31 and will conclude in Omaha, Nebraska from June 22-23/24. North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, NC State, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Tennessee and Florida State won their respective Super Regionals, advancing to the Men's College World Series. These eight teams will compete in Omaha from June 14-23/24. Tournament selections were made  on Monday, May 27.

CONFERENCE TOURNAMENTS: Every conference tournament winner and automatic bid

The 2023 Men's College World Series came to a close when LSU routed Florida 18-4 in the decisive game of the finals to win its seventh national championship.

The complete NCAA regional, Super Regional, 2024 Men's College World Series schedules and results are below. 

• Selection show: Monday, May 27 at Noon ET | ESPN2/ESPNU
• Regionals: Friday-Monday,   May 31-June 3
• Super Regionals: Friday-Monday, June 7-10
• First day of MCWS games:  Start   Friday, June 14
• MCWS finals:  Saturday-Monday, June 22-23/24

2024 NCAA DI baseball tournament bracket

👉  Click or tap here for the interactive 2024 bracket  

Printable MCWS bracket  | Regional brackets  | 64-team bracket

2024 Men's College World Series schedule 

➡️ See the full MCWS schedule release

• Game 1: North Carolina vs. Virginia, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 2:  Tennessee vs. Florida State, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 3: Kentucky vs. NC State, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 4:  Texas A&M vs. Florida, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 5: Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 6:  Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 7: Loser of Game 3 vs. Loser of Game 4, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 8:  Winner of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 9: TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 10:  TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 11: TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 12:  TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 13 (if necessary): TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | TBD
• Game 14 (if necessary):  TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | TBD
• MCWS Final Game 1 : TBD vs. TBD, 7:30 p.m. | ESPN
• MCWS Final Game 2 : TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | ABC
• MCWS Final Game 3 (if necessary) : TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | ESPN

2024 DI baseball tournament super regionals schedule

Dates : Friday-Monday, June 7-10

All times in ET

Knoxville Super Regional

• Game 1: (1) Tennessee 11,  Evansville 6 
• Game 2: Evansville 10,  (1) Tennessee 8
• Game 3: (1) Tennessee 12, Evansville 1
• 🏆  Tennessee advances to the MCWS

Tallahassee Super Regional

• Game 1: (8) Florida State 24, UConn 4
• Game 2: (8) Florida State 10 , UConn 8 (12 innings)
• 🏆  Florida State advances to the MCWS

Charlottesville Super Regional

• Game 1: (12) Virginia 7 , Kansas State 4
• Game 2: (12) Virginia 10 , Kansas State 4
• 🏆 Virginia advances to the MCWS

Chapel Hill Super Regional

• Game 1: (4) North Carolina 8, West Virginia 6
• Game 2:   (4) North Carolina 2, West Virginia 1
• 🏆 North Carolina  advances to the MCWS

Lexington Super Regional

• Game 1: (2) Kentucky 10,  Oregon State 0
• Game 2: (2) Kentucky 3, Oregon State 2
• 🏆 Kentucky  advances to the MCWS

Athens Super Regional

• Game 1: (10) NC State 18 , (7) Georgia 1
• Game 2: (7) Georgia 11, (10) NC State 2
• Game 3: (10) NC State 8,  (7) Georgia 4
• 🏆 NC State  advances to the MCWS

Clemson Super Regional

• Game 1: Florida 10 , (6) Clemson 7
• Game 2: Florida 11,  (6) Clemson 10
• 🏆 Florida advances to the MCWS

Bryan-College Station Super Regional

• Game 1: (3) Texas A&M 10 , Oregon 6
• Game 2: (3) Texas A&M 15, Oregon 9
• 🏆 Texas A&M advances to the MCWS

2024 DI baseball tournament regionals schedule

Here are the regional schedules for Friday, May 31 through Monday, June 3:

Knoxville Regional

• Game 1: Indiana 10, Southern Miss 4
• Game 2:  Tennessee 9, Northern Kentucky 3
• Game 3: Southern Miss 6, Northern Kentucky 0
• Game 4:  Tennessee 12,  Indiana 6 
• Game 5:  Southern Miss 15,  Indiana 3  
• Game 6:  Tennessee 12,  Southern Miss 3

🏆 Tennessee advances

Lexington Regional

• Game 1 : Kentucky 10, Western Michigan 8 
• Game 2:  Illinois 4,  Indiana State 1
• Game 3:  Indiana State 6 , Western Michigan 4
• Game 4:  Kentucky 6,  Illinois 1
• Game 5:   Indiana State 13,  Illinois 2 
• Game 6:  Kentucky 5,  Indiana State 0

🏆 Kentucky advances

Bryan-College Station Regional

• Game 1:   Texas A&M 8, Grambling 0 
• Game 2:  Texas 12,  Louisiana 5
• Game 3:  Louisiana 12,  Grambling 5 
• Game 4:  Texas A&M 4, Texas 2
• Game 5 : Louisiana 10, Texas 2
• Game 6:   Texas A&M 9,  Louisiana 4

🏆 Texas A&M advances

Chapel Hill Regional

• Game 1: LSU 4, Wofford 3
• Game 2: North Carolina 11, LIU 8
• Game 3:  Wofford 5 , LIU 2
• Game 4:  North Carolina 6,  LSU 2
• Game 5:  LSU 13, Wofford 6 
• Game 6:  LSU 8, North Carolina 4
• Game 7:   North Carolina 4,  LSU 3  (10 inn)

🏆 North Carolina advances

Fayetteville Regional

• Game 1:  Arkansas 17, Southeast Missouri 9 
• Game 2:  Kansas State 19 , Louisiana Tech 4 
• Game 3:  Southeast Missouri 9, Louisiana Tech 3
• Game 4:  Kansas State 7, Arkansas 6
• Game 5: Southeast Missouri 6. Arkansas 3
• Game 6:   Kansas State 7,  Southeast Missouri 2

🏆 Kansas State advances

Clemson Regional

• Game 1: Coastal Carolina 13, Vanderbilt 3
• Game 2:  Clemson 4, High Point 3
• Game 3:  High Point 10 , Vanderbilt 9
• Game 4:  Clemson 4, Coastal Carolina 3
• Game 5:  Coastal Carolina 6, High Point 5
• Game 6:  Clemson 12,  Coastal Carolina 5

🏆 Clemson advances

Athens Regional

• Game 1: Georgia 8, Army 7
• Game 2:  UNC Willmington 9, Georgia Tech 0
• Game 3:  Georgia Tech 4 , Army 2
• Game 4:  Georgia 11,  UNC Wilmington 2
• Game 5: Georgia Tech 3, UNC Wilmington 1
• Game 6:  Georgia 8,  Georgia Tech 6  (10 Inn.)

🏆 Georgia advances

Tallahassee Regional

• Game 1: Florida State 7, Stetson 2
• Game 2:  UCF 8,  Alabama 7
• Game 3:  Stetson 4, Alabama  0
• Game 4:  Florida State 5, UCF 2
• Game 5:  UCF 5, Stetson 2 
• Game 6:  Florida State 12,  UCF 4

🏆 Florida State advances

Norman Regional

• Game 1: UConn 4, Duke 1
• Game 2:   Oklahoma 14, Oral Roberts 0 
• Game 3:  Duke 6,  Oral Roberts 2
• Game 4:  UConn 4, Oklahoma 1
• Game 5: Oklahoma 4, Duke 3
• Game 6:  Oklahoma 6, UConn 4
• Game 7:  UConn 7,  Oklahoma 1

🏆 UConn advances

Raleigh Regional

• Game 1:   South Carolina 8,  James Madison 7  
• Game 2:   NC State 9, Bryant 2 
• Game 3: James Madison 8 , Bryant 1
• Game 4:  NC State 6,  South Carolina 4
• Game 5:  James Madison 2,  South Carolina 0 
• Game 6:  NC State 5,  James Madison 3

🏆 NC State advances

Stillwater Regional

• Game 1:  Florida 5,  Nebraska 2 
• Game 2:  Oklahoma State 19, Niagra 7
• Game 3:  Nebraska 7,  Niagara 5
• Game 4:  Oklahoma State 7,  Florida 1
• Game 5 : Florida 17, Nebraska 11
• Game 6:  Florida 5, Oklahoma State 2
• Game 7:   Florida 4, Oklahoma State 2

🏆 Florida advances

Charlottesville Regional

• Game 1: Virginia 4, Penn 2
• Game 2:  Mississippi State 5, St. John’s 2 
• Game 3:   St. John's 10,  Penn 9
• Game 4:  Virginia 5,  Mississippi State 4
• Game 5:  Mississippi State 13, St. John's 5
• Game 6:   Virginia 9,  Mississippi State 2

🏆 Virginia advances

Tucson Regional

• Game 1: West Virginia 4,  DBU 1
• Game 2:  Grand Canyon 9,  Arizona 4
• Game 3:  DBU 7,  Arizona  0
• Game 4:  West Virginia 5, Grand Canyon 2
• Game 5 : Grand Canyon 12, DBU 10 
• Game 6:  West Virginia 10,  Grand Canyon 6

🏆 West Virginia advances

Santa Barbara Regional

• Game 1:  Oregon 5,  San Diego 4
• Game 2:  UC Santa Barbara 9, Fresno State 6
• Game 3:  San Diego 7,  Fresno State 5
• Game 4:   Oregon 2,  UC Santa Barbara 0
• Game 5 : UC Santa Barbara 4, San Diego 2
• Game 6:  Oregon 3,  UC Santa Barbara 0

🏆 Oregon advances

Corvallis Regional

• Game 1:  UC Irvine 13, Nicholls 12 
• Game 2:   Oregon State 10, Tulane 4 
• Game 3:  Tulane 3, Nicholls 0
• Game 4:  Oregon State 5, UC Irvine 3
• Game 5 : UC Irvine 17, Tulane 7
• Game 6 : Oregon State 11, UC Irvine 6

🏆 Oregon State advances

Greenville Regional

• Game 1: Evansville 4, East Carolina 1
• Game 2:  VCU 1,  Wake Forest 0 
• Game 3: East Carolina 7 , Wake Forest 6
• Game 4:  Evansville 17,  VCU 11
• Game 5: East Carolina 10, VCU 7
• Game 6:   East Carolina 19, Evansville 6
• Game 7: Evansville 6,  East Carolina 5

🏆 Evansville advances

Baseball  Championship: Future dates

MCWS HISTORY:  Winningest coaches  |  Most titles  |  Most appearances   |  Conferences most represented

Here is more on how the tournament works:

What is the difference between the Division I baseball tournament and the College World Series?

The NCAA Division I baseball tournament is a 64-team tournament that starts in May. After two rounds of play (which each consist of multiple games), there are just eight teams left. These eight teams then head to Omaha, Neb. for the College World Series. The CWS is the culmination of the DI tournament, where the teams compete in two brackets, with the winners of each meeting in the CWS finals, a best-of-three series to decide the NCAA champion.

When did the College World Series start?

The first-ever NCAA Division I baseball tournament was in 1947, and would barely be recognized as the same tournament nowadays. The 1947 tournament featured just eight teams, which were divided into two four-team, single-elimination brackets. The two winners — California and Yale — then met in a best-of-three final in Kalamazoo, Michigan. California would go undefeated through the inaugural CWS and beat Yale to capture the first title.

How are teams selected for the NCAA Division I baseball tournament?

Since 1954, the NCAA Division I baseball tournament field has been split into two qualifying groups: The automatic berths, and the at-large selections. Since 2014, that in a typical year split sees 31 conference champions receive automatic berths, and 33 teams receive at-large bids, decided by the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee. 

Men's College World Series champs since 1947

California defeated Yale in the first-ever Men's College World Series, the first of two played in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Texas put itself on the map as the first back-to-back champions in winning the only MCWS ever played in Wichita, Kansas in 1949. The following season Texas won its second championship, opening Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha.

Here's a complete list of all the College World Series finals in the 73-year history of the event. Ole Miss won the 2022 Men's College World Series in two games over Oklahoma.

*Indicates undefeated teams in College World Series play.

• Here's how often each seed makes the Men's College World Series

Every Game 3 in Men's College World Series finals history

• How the Men's College World Series works
• Championship Info
• Game Program

Men's College World Series

• 🗓️ 2024 schedule
• 🔮 Future dates
• 🤔 How the MCWS works
• 🏆 Programs with the most MCWS titles
• 💪 Coaches with the most MCWS wins
• ⚾ Every champion in tournament history

Everything you need to know about how the Men's College World Series works

Di baseball news.

• Here's what's happened in every Game 3 in MCWS finals history
• Spotlighting the absorbing storylines of the 2024 Men's College World Series
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College baseball career home run leaders

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The best times to visit Bali based on your travel goals

Oct 30, 2023 • 4 min read

In Bali, the weather is warm and the hammocks are comfortable year-round © anyaberkut / Getty Images

With awe-inspiring scenery, dense layers of culture, plenty of sun, surf and sand, and balmy temperatures year-round, Bali calls out like a beacon to adventurers, sun-seekers and travelers who like to truly immerse themselves in the countries they visit. Whatever your travel tastes, you'll find rewarding things to see and do in Bali at any time of year.

The dry season, from April to September, is the most enjoyable time of the year for outdoor activities, including basking on beaches, hiking, surfing, sailing, diving and canyoning. Visit during the wet season (November to March), and you'll experience frequent downpours, but there's good surf on the east coast, and you can still enjoy the outdoors, especially in drier areas in the east and north of the island. Temperatures in Bali don’t vary much from season to season, hovering between 28°C and 32°C (82°F to 90°F) year-round, though it's often cooler in mountain areas. Whatever you're looking for in Bali, here are the best times to come.

The high season (July–August and December) is the best time for festivals and partying

The high season in Bali coincides with the traditional summer vacation season in Europe, America, and Australia in July and August. It's the height of the dry season and the peak time for surfing on the west coast at the breaks around Canggu and Seminyak . Bali's original beach hub, Kuta , can be mobbed at this time of year, as many travelers come here specifically for the party season. 

Most parts of Bali are inundated with visitors in summer, as tourists come to sample the island’s many delights and enjoy some of its most colorful festivals. Indonesia celebrates its independence from colonial powers on August 17 with plenty of pomp and fanfare. Expect entertaining parades and street parties in the bigger towns. 

The period around Christmas and New Year also sees a large influx of travelers seeking a reprieve from cold northern winters. Many hotels, restaurants and other venues organize special dinners and entertainment to mark the festive season. New Year’s Eve is particularly memorable, with spectacular fireworks at midnight to help you rock in the new year in style. Key events to look out for are the Pemuteran Bay Festival, Penglipuran Village Festival and, of course, New Year’s Eve celebrations. 

High season means high prices and pressing hordes in tightly-packed tourist areas; for a quieter experience, seek out more remote spots such as Nusa Penida and Pemuteran .

The shoulder season (April–June and September–October) is best for adventurous travelers

The shoulder season in Bali falls at either end of the dry season, when the weather is either improving after the rains or getting slowly wetter after the dry months. Things are quieter without the summertime crowds, and the weather is normally still dry enough for outdoor activities. However, the two-week Easter spring break can get very busy in tourist areas such as Kuta and Legian .

May marks the surfing season in full swing on the west and south coasts, and rafting, trekking and spelunking beckon adventure sports fans.

As rain showers in October are more frequent than in the dry summer months, plan to spend some time indoors visiting temples, museums and cultural institutions in Ubud , Denpasar , and other centers for Balinese culture. Top international events in October include the  Ubud Village Jazz Festival  and the  Ubud Writers and Readers Festival . 

The low season (January–March and November) is best for budget travelers

Bali’s low season coincides with the rainiest months of the year, and this can be an unpredictable time for outdoor activities. The crowds have decamped back home, and the island is returning to a more relaxed vibe, but there's still decent surf on the east coast at such legendary locations as Padang Padang, and the weather is still warm. Accommodation prices fall considerably, which is great news for budget travelers.

At the end of January or the start of February, Chinese New Year celebrations feature typical Balinese elements such as traditional percussion bands and dancers dressed as the mythological lion-like creature Barong. 

The festival of Nyepi, the Balinese New Year, moves with the lunar calendar but frequently falls in March. This is a culturally fascinating time to visit Bali, but after the colorful parades of ogoh-ogoh puppets the night before the festival, the Day of Silence itself can be a tricky time for visitors as everything closes, transport ceases, and nobody is allowed out on the streets.

Understanding the Balinese calendar

Note that religious festivals such as Galungan and Kuningan are scheduled according to the Balinese 210-day pawukon calendar. This means they happen roughly every seven months, according to the Western calendar. Dates for village festivals are not always set in stone either, and the timing of the Nyepi festival is dictated by the lunar saka calendar, meaning the date changes every year. If you’re planning a trip around a festival or event, check the precise dates before you book your flights.

This article was first published Dec 3, 2021 and updated Oct 30, 2023.

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