Microsoft (News - Alert) has become the collaboration backbone for a staggering number of organizations. By the middle of this year, Microsoft Teams was serving roughly 320 million daily active users. Meanwhile, Teams Phone (News - Alert) has continued to grow, with more than 20 million PSTN-enabled users across Operator Connect, Direct Routing, Calling Plans, and Teams Phone Mobile. At this scale, performance issues aren’t rare, and the way enterprises see (or fail to see) those issues determines user experience and confidence.
Teams became the default collaboration hub for many enterprises because it sits at the front door of Microsoft 365 and has tight integration with the entire Microsoft portfolio. Identity and access flow through Entra ID (Azure AD), calendars and meetings through Outlook and Exchange, and files live in SharePoint and OneDrive. They are tightly integrated into chat, channels, meetings, and apps. That cohesion reduces app-switching and governance sprawl and IT can enforce conditional access and security baselines without stitching together multiple vendor stacks. For end users, it simply feels like one workspace where documents, conversations, and meetings live together.
Hybrid work amplified this advantage. Teams adapts to home and office realities with device flexibility, bandwidth optimization, noise suppression, background effects, live captions/translation, and persistent chat that bridges time zones. It also unifies modalities such as asynchronous channels, real-time meetings, and enterprise voice via Teams Phone, as well as room experiences with one-touch join. Admins gain centralized policies and quality analytics across clients and devices, while the platform’s ecosystem (first-party apps, third-party integrations, and low-code Power Platform) brings workflows into the conversation. More recently, Copilot’s meeting recap and knowledge capabilities have made Teams not just where work happens, but where context is created and retrieved.
Why monitoring is harder in Microsoft shops
That said, it’s not all rosy for IT teams. In Microsoft-first environments, visibility is powerful but fragmented. Admins depend on multiple native consoles, including their Call Quality Dashboard (CQD), Teams Admin Center, Teams Rooms Pro, and Microsoft 365 Service Health. Each is optimized for a slice of the experience, which creates data silos and slows fault isolation, especially when capabilities differ by license tier. The result is a familiar pattern: Too many dashboards, uneven depth of insight, and finger-pointing between network, UC, and app teams during incidents – and, ultimately, sub-par user experiences.
Complexity has also grown with “premium” experiences that many enterprises are now rolling out. Teams Phone adds carriers, SIP trunks, and session border controllers (SBCs), while Teams Rooms Pro introduces expensive, multi-vendor room kits that include displays, cameras, speakerphones. In these cases, configuration drift and firmware issues can quietly degrade quality.
What’s more, Copilot raises the stakes for app performance and sign-in flow because it is increasingly embedded in daily work. These services involve meaningful investments and executive visibility, so even small degradations feel big.
The hybrid/remote workforce compounds the challenge. The effective path for a call or meeting now crosses home Wi-Fi, last-mile ISP, corporate WAN or SD-Internet, SBCs, the public internet, and Microsoft’s edge. When tooling only sees what’s happening inside Microsoft’s cloud, teams struggle to prove where the problem lives. That is why hop-by-hop path visibility – from the endpoint all the way to the Microsoft data center – has become critically important.
Finally, the velocity of change – licensing, features, devices, firmware, and network policies – means yesterday’s good dashboard isn’t enough today.
What users feel when visibility is missing
Here’s the thing: Users often don’t file tickets about packet loss. Rather, they complain that “the audio was choppy,” “the screen share froze,” or “we had to redial three times.” In Teams, these micro-failures look like jitter, one-way audio, broken DTMF, echo, log-in friction, and the dreaded “stuck on connecting”. These are issues that create poor experiences and can even be career-limiting when they happen during a board briefing or an earnings webcast.
Microsoft’s own tools will often show that a call was “good” against a limited set of thresholds, even when people had a poor subjective experience. Without cross-source correlation and path context, it is hard to reconcile what the user felt with what the dashboard claims.
Telephony raises the stakes further. With more than 20 million PSTN users on Teams Phone, mean time to innocence (is it the ISP, the SBC, the trunk, or Microsoft?) becomes a real business metric. If IT can’t quickly pinpoint where in the path a problem originates, unnecessary escalations and slow hand-offs drive up frustration and cost. For distributed workforces, the weak link is just as likely to be a home Wi-Fi hop or local ISP segment as something inside Microsoft’s cloud.
There’s also the timing gap. Service Health advisories are authoritative but, by design, they are validated and posted after Microsoft confirms scope and impact. Many tenants experience an issue before an advisory appears, leaving support teams reactive at exactly the wrong moment. The operational lesson is to augment native capabilities with independent, proactive signals, so IT teams can warn users and switch modalities early (e.g., PSTN fallback or an alternate bridge) instead of waiting for a formal incident report.
Why native tools aren’t enough on their own
Microsoft’s views are essential for understanding what’s happening inside Microsoft’s domain. That includes device state, call aggregates, per-call media metrics, real-time telemetry, and incident history. But, they were never meant to diagnose ISP congestion, prove a trunk issue, or visualize a failing Wi-Fi hop in someone’s home office. That boundary matters because the modern Teams experience spans components Microsoft doesn’t own, like ISPs, enterprise networks, SBCs, SIP trunks, and third-party room devices.
Licensing also shapes visibility. Many of the most advanced admin features live behind Teams Premium, yet Premium seats represent a very small fraction of the total user base – roughly 1 percent. Even as Microsoft evolves first-party tooling, most enterprises still need correlated, hop-by-hop evidence that unifies cloud metrics with network path context and voice infrastructure data.
When Rooms and hybrid environments – such as using Teams internally and Zoom for external webinars – the operational picture gets even messier. Splitting workflows across multiple admin portals makes it harder to spot cross-platform patterns or to present a single, consistent view to service desks and leadership. A unified operational approach with one set of reports and drill-downs across Meetings, Rooms, and Phone, including Zoom where relevant, is a much more pragmatic approach..
A look at Martello Vantage DX
Martello’s Vantage DX is designed to complement Microsoft’s native views with proactive signals and cross-domain evidence that matter during real incidents. It runs continuous synthetic tests that imitate real user actions across Microsoft 365 – most notably Teams meetings and Teams Phone – to surface trouble before tickets spike. Those synthetics also function as early warning beacons, with customers seeing alerts of Microsoft outages up to an hour before official advisories. That buys time to warn users and switch modalities.
When something does go wrong, Vantage DX adds hop-by-hop network path tracing from the endpoint through Wi-Fi/LAN, ISP, and the public internet to the Microsoft edge. That end-to-end view, combined with automated data correlation, helps teams pinpoint root cause quickly and prevents the blame game between carriers, WAN teams, and app owners. In practice, it creates the evidence you need to prove an ISP issue or to avoid unnecessary escalations into Microsoft when the problem is clearly upstream.
For voice, the platform leans into the realities of Teams Phone at scale. Vantage DX can place 24x7 synthetic PSTN calls to catch degradations early and, during live incidents, it provides end-to-end visibility from the user to the SBC, SIP trunks, and PSTN. This gives IT teams the visibility into where quality breaks down. It also helps optimize costs by showing where Teams Phone licenses are deployed and actually used, reducing waste and unnecessary trunking capacity. It also features the ability to auto-correlate SBC call records with Microsoft CQD in a single view, eliminating manual timestamp hunting and shrinking time-to-root-cause when MOS scores dip or call failures spike.
In Teams Rooms, Vantage DX focuses on protecting the ROI of costly room builds. It tracks room utilization and in-room quality, auto-creates ITSM tickets to the right local team when thresholds are breached, and uses network path tracing to flag issues outside the room when the problem isn’t in the AV kit. This directly addresses common pain points like poor visibility beyond the room walls, multi-vendor complexity, and the “more places things can go wrong” reality of modern conference facilities.
Operationally, Vantage DX aims to standardize workflows rather than add another silo. IT teams get one console and a single set of reports, support processes, and drill-down dashboards that span Meetings, Rooms, and Phone (and Teams plus Zoom when needed), so frontline support and leadership consume the same story at all times.
The bottom line
At Microsoft’s scale, experience issues are guaranteed. The only questions are how early you see them and how quickly you can prove where they live so they can be fixed? Native Microsoft tools are useful, but their scope, timing, and license gating leave gaps. Closing those gaps means pairing Microsoft’s telemetry with proactive signals and path-level evidence.
Join me on Tuesday, September, 11:00am ET, when I’ll sit down with Martello’s Richard Ashbee and Derek Burke to dig deeper into how you, too, can Solve Microsoft Performance Troubles Before They Hit Your Inbox. This isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill webinar with a single presenter. We’re going to have an interactive discussion with specific examples designed truly help organizations better equip themselves to deal with quality issues in their Microsoft environments. Martello is a Microsoft ISV Success partner with a Teams specialization – its digital experience monitoring solution has been specifically designed to support Microsoft environments. If you’re not able to join us for the live webinar, the on-demand version will be available the following day.
Edited by
Erik Linask
