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Due to the recent shift in work environments caused by COVID-19, professionals around the world have had no option but to adapt how they communicate on a daily basis or risk falling behind. As a result, modern enterprise video communication products like Zoom have become an essential part of both business and educational settings. However, like every other piece of software out there, issues with video services are bound to happen and can significantly reduce efficiency on a regular basis.
For students and teachers, a problematic zoom environment can cause a delay in curriculums or, even worse, individual students can miss out on valuable information as they lose service during lectures. For business professionals, a poorly functioning meeting call is the last thing they need to worry about when trying to close a deal or meet with a high priority client.
Introducing RapDev’s Datadog Zoom Integration. It comes pre-built and packaged with four fully customizable dashboards that bring the most crucial information to the surface, allowing users to fully understand their account(s) usage in one concise location. As an added layer of protection, our team has included two real-time room monitors. Should one of the available rooms go offline or experience a performance issue (e.g. microphones don’t work, latency issues, etc…), your teams will receive an alert to notify them of the event along with what caused it to happen.
We configure the agent to make requests to the Zoom API once every 60 seconds, resulting in fast and accurate metrics. While this can be changed to a shorter interval for even faster metrics, the Zoom API may limit your number of calls per day based on your account plan.
To wrap it all together, our graphs were designed to be easily digestible by both technical and non-technical roles, including C-level executives, engineers, and compliance teams. Let’s dive into the dashboards to better understand the metrics they provide and the value it can bring your team(s).
1. Overview Dashboard
The Overview Dashboard provides high-level insight into ongoing meetings and standard account metrics. Users can draw information such as how many live meetings are occurring at any point in time, number of users in meetings, number of registered users, percentage of video/audio loss, type of connections (e.g. wifi, wired, etc…), participants by location, and the Total Meeting Bandwidth. These visuals are perfect for those who just want to spend a couple of minutes looking at a detailed overview to make sure everything looks OK.
When first pulling up this information, we recommend ensuring that there are no clear outliers in your loss percentage graphs. Comparing the meeting bandwidth information with the user bandwidth by location can provide valuable insights into problems originating from specific locations. If a user detects anything that could be concerning, the next steps would be to jump into the Call Quality dashboard to obtain a more detailed view.
2. Call Quality Dashboard
The Call Quality Dashboard dives into the granular details specific to the quality of service that your Zoom users are seeing in their calls. This dashboard provides crucial network metrics like bitrate, jitter, latency, average loss, and max loss on a user to user basis across every meeting. The metrics are divided into two main categories, one for Audio and another for Video. Within each category, the Datadog agent picks up data for both input and output. As a result, when users experience issues with the video/audio that is being broadcasted by other users (input) or the video/audio that they are broadcasting (output), our analytics will be able to pinpoint on the source of the issues.
The importance of ensuring your users are not consistently running into the same patterns of network is often overlooked. Most administrations assume that meeting issues are temporary and will go away on their own. More often than not, that is not the case and you should have proper tooling in place to detect the patterns of poor service before they impact your day to day operations. However, sometimes issues are not on the users end and may be related to their datacenter location.
3. Geolocation Dashboard
Since a significant portion of employees today are working remote, the Geolocation Dashboard is a must for determining locations with low quality service. Using the world heat map, you can effortlessly see the geographical distribution of your users, making it simple to understand where the majority of your workforce is connecting from. Similar to the call quality dashboard, the Geolocation dashboard also provides call quality metrics such as Bitrate, Jitter, Latency, average loss, and Max Loss.. On comparing these metrics to the ones from the Call Quality dashboard, you will be able to differentiate whether problems are occurring due to your user's environment (e.g. wifi speeds, computer speed, microphone issues, etc...) or could be due to something as simple as changing the datacenter they are connecting through.
For your Zoom meeting needs, the three dashboards discussed previously in this blog used together provide a full picture of usage by meetings, users, locations, and network metrics. They can help identify and remove service bottlenecks in your meetings and significantly improve the quality of service that you receive with your Zoom License. In addition to meetings, Zoom allows their clients to purchase Rooms for an integrated conferencing experience.
4. Rooms Dashboard
For those Zoom clients who are currently leveraging the Zoom Rooms functionality, our Rooms Dashboard integrates with several monitors to ensure that your rooms are readily available without any issues. Along with real-time meeting metrics, our SLO and Room Health and Status provide insight into every room and each of its components (e.g. Microphone, Speaker, Camera, etc…) and its status (Healthy, Warning, Critical). Within a minute of any devices malfunctioning or issues occurring inside one of your Zoom Rooms, your team(s) can be notified and will be provided with the actionable information to address the problems before they begin to critically impact your rooms. Alongside the status tables, there are 8 tracker widgets that extrapolate your room health/status counts (# of rooms offline, # of healthy rooms, # of problematic rooms, etc...) and bring them to the surface to quickly provide you with an idea of how reliable your rooms are currently.
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If you are not currently using the Rooms functionality, we still recommend that enterprise users implement Zoom monitoring as there is significant upside, even without a Rooms license. Without proper monitoring and analytics tooling in place, you will not be able to unlock the full value of the Zoom license you are paying for. Whether it is determining if you are paying for more seats than what you are actively using, have network issues, or anywhere in between, RapDev's Zoom integration will make sure you have all your bases covered.
Maximize your Datadog License
RapDev bringing a Zoom Integration into the Datadog Marketplace makes it very easy for new users to get up and running with just a few clicks. If you are already using Datadog for other monitoring and analytics purposes, there is no reason to use any other zoom monitoring platform when you can have all your information in one easy to access place. In addition, if you determine that RapDev's integration is missing functionality that would be useful to you, we are constantly evolving to make our tools better so drop us a message with your request and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
So what are you waiting for? Check out more information here or get in touch with our sales team today!
