Thousand Eyes

1. ThousandEyes
Partner
Monitoring Collaboration Services
Solution Use Case
OVERVIEW
Customers rely upon collaboration solutions like Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom, Slack and others
for employee collaboration. Interruptions to these services, especially if they are cloud-based, can
have broad impact across a company and leave the IT team with little data to triage the nature of
the issue i.e. internal or external. Having KPIs that measure employee experience with these
collaboration applications and using data to quickly identify external ISP or cloud service provider
problems helps IT teams mitigate short term impact and provide data to manage expectations with
internal stakeholders.
HOW THOUSANDEYES IS RELEVANT
ThousandEyes has a suite of voice, network and DNS tests that allow customers to simulate end-
users accessing collaboration services. The test data provides quantitive metrics around the
performance of a given collaboration service, and provides actionable data in the event of a
service disruption. ThousandEyes makes sharing this data with the stakeholder concerned easy,
reducing the time taken to both diagnose an issue as being internal or not, and then reducing the
time needed to get the service provider to take action.
How ThousandEyes is deployed is dependent on the collaboration service utilized:
• Real-time applications like Webex and Zoom are susceptible to network degradation due to
their use of real time audio and video. For real-time components, ThousandEyes is best
applied by measuring Internet network quality from each branch office to the collaboration
service’s local audio/video service point.
• There are also non real-time components to applications like Webex and Zoom that allow
end-users to perform actions like login, setup meetings, access recordings, or access APIs
that integrate with external solutions like Slack, Webex or Teams. These components
should be monitored using ThousandEyes core Web and Network tests. Tests measuring
against web or API endpoints should be correlated against network baselines.
The figure below shows packet loss in the network has degraded the MOS score for a voice call.
Also identified is the location in the path where the service degradation is occurring.
CUSTOMER USE CASE EXAMPLE
An international engineering and services company providing elevators, moving walkways and
automatic doors employs 55,000 people across 60 countries. This company deployed
ThousandEyes in parallel with an Avaya VoIP solution across Europe and APAC.
The customer experienced call quality problems in their Sydney branch. ThousandEyes quickly
pinpointed two problems, high latency spikes on a specific link in the path, and high packet loss
in a specific core router. Both of these issues were affecting VoIP signaling traffic. After bringing
© Cisco Systems, all rights reserved. Version 2.0. March ’21. Author: Bob P. boporter@cisco.com
ThousandEyes
Partner
EDX CDX WAN

2. ThousandEyes
Partner
Solution Use Case - Monitoring Collaboration Services
Page 2
these issues to the attention of the service providers responsible, remedial action was taken to
correct the issues. Shown below is packet loss data generated from multiple tests running from
remote branches. The result of the service provider’s mitigation can be clearly seen:
FAQ
We are seeing Webex audio/video issues. How can ThousandEyes help?
ThousandEyes has a solution architecture for Webex. This describes the tests needed and the
endpoints to monitor in order to provide a comprehensive solution to Webex monitoring. Similar
documentation is available for Microsoft Teams.
We have Genesys as the call center solution. Agents report voice issues and we have to
troubleshoot. How can ThousandEyes help?
ThousandEyes can distinguish between problems on the network and between SIP control plane
problems and RTP voice traffic. These capabilities allow quick triage as to the nature of the issue.
Can ThousandEyes help us with voice capacity planning as we spin up a new branch?
ThousandEyes can provide a benchmark as to how an application is performing over an existing
network, how often transient conditions occur and the affect these have on the application of
concern. This insight is a useful input into the capacity planning process of any network / application
rollout.
Where should we deploy agents to understand voice experience?
As a general rule, agents should be co-located with the users so test results reflect the user
perspective. Tests targets are infrastructure the user depends on to authenticate, setup meetings,
and so on. Additionally in the case of VoIP call quality tests, a ThousandEyes agent is required both
ends of the path to be measured due to the nature of testing required to ultimately yield a MOS score.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCE MATERIAL
• Blog post: Webex Monitoring
• Blog post: Complete VoIP Visibility with SIP and RTP
• Recorded Webinar: VoIP Monitoring and Troubleshooting
ThousandEyes
Partner