Get familiar with 5 Tools of Microsoft Teams

Teams is still evolving in the context of handy tools for troubleshooting, For example, we still don’t have a kind of tool like snooper to read the Teams app logs.txt (text logs). But there are few good tools available that can help you in your planning phase, deployment, Network health and connectivity interpretation, and call quality measurement. Let’s have a look at them with the reference of URL’s and basic insights.

1. Network Testing Companion

Using this tool, you can easily analyze and interpret the network quality and connectivity from your network to Microsoft network and share the output with you your Network Teams. You can use this in Teams deployment phase as well as in troubleshooting for any potential network issues in the existing environment.

Download the tool and documentation

2. Network Planner for Microsoft Teams

This tool is available in the Teams admin center. you can get it, by going to Teams admin > Planner > Network planner. Network Planner can help you determine and organize network requirements for connecting Microsoft Teams users across your organization.

Network Planner for Microsoft Teams documentation

3. Advisor for Microsoft Teams

Till writing this post, This is a in preview or early release feature.

This tool assesses your Microsoft 365 organization environment and identifies the most common configurations that you may need to update or modify before you can successfully roll out Teams. Then, Advisor for Teams creates a Deployment team (in Teams), with channels for each workload you want to roll out.

Teams, Forms, and Planner licenses are required to use Advisor for Teams. However, you don’t have to be a Teams admin to use Advisor for Teams – anybody in your organization can use it.

Advisor for Microsoft Teams documentation

4. CQD (Call Quality Dashboard) and Call Analytics

CQD will help you to understand the all call quality matrices for Teams. It provides a cool view of the dashboard which could be view in Power Bi Reports as well. CQD in teams has been extended with advanced CQD which uses a near-real-time data feed. Call Records are available at the CQD portal on average in 30 minutes (in comparison to the previous CQD which is on average of 24 hours). CQD v3 supports the use of drill through or drill-down fields in SPD reports.

Call Analytics and Call Quality Dashboard documentation

5. Charles Proxy for Understanding the logs

You may not agree with me here, since you can use others web/http debugger tools, but my experience with Charles proxy was good and in my opinion, you should have a try with it (30 days trail version is available).

Troubleshooting Microsoft Teams with Charles HTTP debugger

Thomas Binder has also covered a small chunk of use of charles proxy in his Ignite session “Understanding Media Flows in Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business – BRK4004“. Section “29.37“