Getting started with Collaboration Experience

Collaboration Experience allows you to see, diagnose and fix call quality issues more efficiently, thanks to:

Dashboards that help you detect and investigate issues at the organization, device and call levels.
Alert monitors that you can install from Nexthink Library to alert you of poor-quality calls.
Configurations that you can import into the Applications module to correlate call quality with application performance.
Remote actions that gather additional information about application crashes, Microsoft Teams and Zoom activities, and peripherals usage.

Collaboration Experience helps you troubleshoot call quality issues on individual computers and devices running Microsoft Teams meeting rooms.

This product expansion requires a Collaboration Experience license. Contact your Nexthink representative for more information.

Detecting and diagnosing call quality issues

The Collaboration Tools module

The Collaboration Tools module contains a number of dashboards that combine third-party data about call quality and technical details with contextual information about device performance, connectivity, properties and usage of other applications. Refer to the Using Collaboration Tools documentation for more information.

The Device View module

Access call quality data in Device View to correlate it with device activity, resource consumption, connectivity and usage of other applications. Refer to the Using Device View for call quality issues documentation for more information.

Library alert monitors

The Nexthink Library module offers library content to help you set up alert monitors that keep track of the number of poor sessions for Microsoft Teams and Zoom applications used in your environment. Refer to the Using alerts for call quality issues documentation for more information.

Defining the call quality

The key metrics used in Collaboration Experience refer to the call quality classification of an individual collaboration session as either good, poor or unclassified (unknown). These classifications come directly from Microsoft Teams or Zoom and are based on a variety of factors.

The system calculates call quality using the following logic:

Good quality: audio quality is good and video quality is good.
Bad quality: audio quality is poor or video quality is poor.

The system breaks down the call quality into several elements, each with a specific threshold. If the threshold is breached, it affects the quality of the call.

Measure	Units	Threshold	Description
Jitter	Milliseconds	Less than 30ms	Jitter is a measure of the variation in packet delay for a data stream. When this is too high, audio can become choppy.
Packet loss	Percentage	Less than 10%	Packet loss occurs when data packets fail to reach their destination. The percentage of packets lost is based on the total number of packets sent.
Round trip time	Milliseconds	Less than 500ms	Round trip time is the time it takes for a single packet to travel from the client to the remote endpoint and back to the client. High round trip time can cause delays in stream playback.
Frame rate (video calls only)	Frames per second	Less than 7	For outbound video streams, frame rate (FPS) is the number of frames per second of video the client is sending. Lower than expected values may suggest system resource constraints, insufficient network bandwidth or malfunctioning video capture devices.

Calls vs Sessions

Each participant of a call has a separate collaboration session ID. A call always has a single call ID and comprises multiple sessions, 2 at a minimum.

Microsoft Teams and Zoom determine the call quality at the collaboration session level. As a result, all metrics concerning call quality are actually calculating collaboration based on session IDs.

The NQL references for these two measures are as follows:

Collaboration Session: collaboration.sesssions.id
Call: collaboration.sessions.call.id

Permissions and configuration

A Nexthink platform administrator must configure Collaboration Experience before data is made available to relevant dashboards, and enable proper permissions for Nexthink platform users.

Refer to the Configuring Collaboration Experience documentation for more information.