Ask any Teams admin how call quality was last month and you will get a pretty good answer. Poor Call Rate per building, CQD reports, Power BI templates, etc. Microsoft gives you handy tools for that.
Now ask a different question: How many Teams calls are running in your organization right now, and who is suffering in them?
Most admins I talk to can’t answer that one. Not because they are doing something wrong, but because the tooling is not built for it. Instead of being reactive, wouldn’t it be beneficial to be able to see what is going on right now? Which networks are having an higher than normal amount of bad calls and which users are currently affected while still in a call?. So, let’s dive into the topic.
Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.
The service desk phone rings: “Teams is terrible today, everybody is complaining.” At that moment you need four answers:
- How many calls and meetings are running right now, and how many users are in them?
- How many of those calls are potentially impacted?
- Which users are having a bad experience at this very minute, and with what: audio, video or screen sharing?
- Is it one person, one office, one access point or a whole network?
If the honest answer is “we’ll know in about half an hour”, then you are troubleshooting history. Not the problem in front of you. It also means you have no clue about the size and urgency of the issue as a message like: ‘everybody is complaining’ should be verified before acting on (users do tend to exaggerate).
How Microsoft’s call data actually reaches you
To understand the gap, it helps to look at how the data flows.
Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) is the org-wide view. The quality record that feeds it is only complete once the call has ended. Microsoft says records typically show up in CQD within 30 minutes of the end of a call, in rare cases later (Microsoft Learn). So, CQD is great for trends by building, subnet or region. But it tells you what went wrong, not what is going wrong.
Real-Time Analytics (RTA) is the live option, and it is built around a single user. You select the user, open the Meetings & calls tab and drill into one meeting. It covers scheduled meetings and Meet Now, not 1:1 calls, group calls or PSTN calls. Without a Teams Premium license, telemetry is only collected once an admin opens that in-progress meeting (Microsoft Learn).
So you need to know who is suffering before you can see that they are suffering? Basically, yes.
To be fair, Microsoft is moving. The new org-wide “single pane” in the Teams admin center, rolling out later this year, lists in-progress meetings across the organization. A welcome step. However, a meeting only shows up when at least one participant has a Teams Premium or Teams Rooms Pro license, and calls only appear once they are completed (MC1462463).
What a live, org-wide view looks like
So, what would I want to see instead? Let’s look at an example from TrueDEM, taken mid-morning. Picture 1 shows 1,346 calls with 3,147 users running across Europe at that moment. 395 users had audio issues, 175 video issues and 159 screen sharing issues, each plotted on its own map.
Below the maps, every managed network IT controls is a row: call score, number of calls, users in calls, and how many users struggle with audio, video or screen sharing. Most managed networks score in the 80s to 100. Not really special. One stands out at a score of 22: 5 calls, 9 users, 7 of them with problems, mostly video. That is where I would look first.
One click opens that network and shows who is affected. Not half an hour ago but right now (Picture 2).
The top detected issue here is Video_TotalReorderedPacket, 76% of all findings, followed by ScreenShare_TotalReorderedPacket with 17%. Each active call is listed with its score, device, duration and the specific issue. One user, only 1:29 minutes into the call, already scores 25 because of Audio_Jitter. IT can reach out before that user ever picks up the phone.
Now think about the following: most users join calls over Wi-Fi. An access point is a shared medium, so all clients connected to it share its airtime. That is why, besides the managed networks IT controls, TrueDEM can provide the same live view per Wi-Fi access point (BSSID) for organizations who integrate their BSSID mapping: how many calls and users each one carries right now, and whether that load introduces capacity problems. Seeing 10 concurrent calls on a single access point is a strong hint why devices start failing over to other access points mid-call.
Side by side
| Question | Microsoft built-in | Live, org-wide view (TrueDEM) |
| Starting point | Select one user, then one meeting | View the whole organization, then a network or access point, then a user |
| When you see it | RTA live per meeting; CQD ~30 minutes after the call ends | While the call is running |
| What’s covered live | Scheduled meetings and Meet Now | All meetings, Meet Now, group and peer-peer calls. |
| License dependency | Live data needs Teams Premium | No Teams Premium needed |
| Grouping | By user or meeting; network context later in CQD | By managed networks, external networks and Wi-Fi access points |
So why is this important?
A bad call can’t be fixed after it ends. The client pitch or board meeting is over by the time the report arrives. Permanently.
Now you could argue that users will open a ticket if it’s really bad. Conceptually you would be right. However, most of them don’t. They switch off video, dial in by phone or just live with it. A live view finds those silent sufferers.
On top of that:
- One user or a whole site? Networks and access points side by side tell you whom to call: the user or the network team.
- Proactive beats reactive. Reaching out before the ticket arrives changes how users see IT.
- Proof during change. New Wi-Fi, VPN change or a new office? Watch call quality react in real time, not tomorrow.
Am I the only one asking?
Obviously not. The same need shows up in public forums:
- A consultant wrote that their client needs a real-time Teams call quality dashboard and asked how to build one. The answers pointed to stitching together Graph API data and even disagreed on how delayed CQD actually is (Fabric Community).
- On Microsoft Tech Community, an admin described users complaining about poor calls while the dashboard rated nearly all of them as “Good” (Tech Community). Very helpful, right?
- Microsoft’s own roadmap now promises admins a way to proactively troubleshoot active meetings across the organization (Roadmap 568782). So, the demand is real. The question is how complete and how live the picture is.
Bottom line
CQD tells you how last month went. RTA tells you how one meeting is going. A live, org-wide view tells you who is suffering right now, and where. That’s where TrueDEM makes the difference as it is the one that lets you fix the experience while it still matters.
Bad call quality used to be something you analyzed in the post mortem. Meanwhile, Teams is where the business happens, live. So, perhaps it’s time to start monitoring it that way.
