Communications Services Insights Preview

Overview

Within your Communications Resource, we have provided an Insights Preview feature that displays a number of data visualizations conveying insights from the Azure Monitor logs and metrics monitored for your Communications Services. The visualizations within Insights are made possible via Azure Monitor Workbooks. In order to take advantage of Workbooks, follow the instructions outlined in Enable Azure Monitor in Diagnostic Settings, and to enable Workbooks, you will need to send your logs to a Log Analytics workspace destination.

Accessing Azure Insights for Communication Services

1. From the Azure Portal homepage, select your Communication Service resource:

   

2. Once you are inside your resource, scroll down on the left nav bar to the Monitor category and click on the Insights tab:

   

3. This should display the Insights dashboard for your Communication Service resource:

   

Insights dashboard navigation

The Communication Service Insights dashboards give users an intuitive and clear way to navigate their resource’s log data. The Overview section provides a view across all modalities, so the user can see the different ways in which their resource has been used in a specific time range:

Users can control the time range and time granularity to display with the parameters displayed at the top:

These parameters are global, meaning that they will update the data displayed across the entire dashboard.

The Overview section contains an additional parameter to control the type of visualization that is displayed:

This parameter is local, meaning it only affects the plots in this section.

The rest of the tabs display log data that is related to a specific modality.

Since Voice and video logs are the most complex in nature, this modality is broken down into four subsections:

The Summary tab contains general information about Voice and video usage, including the types of media streams shared, the types of endpoints participating in a call (e.g. VoIP, Bot, Application, PSTN, or Server), the OS usage, and participant end reasons:

The Volume tab under the Voice and video modality displays the number of calls and the number of participants in a specific period of time (Time range parameter), subdivided into time bins (Time granularity parameter):

The Volume tab contains a Grouping parameter, which helps visualize the number of calls and participants segmented by either Call type (P2P vs. Group calls) and Interop Calls (pure Azure Communication Services vs. Teams Interop):

The Quality tab under Voice and video allows users to inspect the quality distribution of calls, where quality is defined at three levels for this dashboard:

• The proportion of poor-quality media streams (Stream quality plot), where a stream’s quality is classified as Poor when it has at least one unhealthy telemetry value, where unhealthy ranges are defined as:

  • Jitter > 30 milliseconds
  • Packet loss rate > 10%
  • Round trip time > 500 milliseconds

• The proportion of Impacted calls, where an impacted call is defined as a call that has at least one poor quality stream

• Participant end reasons, which keep track of the reason why a participant left a call. End reasons are SIP codes, which are numeric codes that describe the specific status of a signaling request. SIP codes can be grouped into six categories: Success, Client Failure, Server Failure, Global Failure, Redirection, and Provisional. The distribution of SIP code categories is shown in the pie chart on the left hand side, while a list of the specific SIP codes for participant end reasons is provided on the right hand side

Quality can also be filtered by the types of media streams (Media Type parameter) used in the call, e.g. to only get the impacted calls in terms of video stream quality:

And can also be filtered by endpoint types (Endpoint Type parameter), e.g. getting the participant end reasons for PSTN participants. These filters allow for multiple selections:

The Details tab offers a quick way to navigate through the Voice and video calls made in a time range by grouping calls by dates, and showing the details of every call made in terms of the participants in that call and the outgoing streams per participant, together with duration and telemetry values for these:

The details of a call are initially hidden. A list of the participants is displayed after clicking on a call:

And clicking on a participant displays a list of the outgoing streams for that participant, together with their duration (proportional to the full call duration) and telemetry values, where unhealthy values are displayed in red:

The Authentication tab shows authentication logs, which are created through operations such as issuing an access token or creating an identity. The data displayed includes the types of operations performed and the results of those operations:

The Chat tab displays the data for all chat-related operations and their result types:

The SMS tab displays the operations and results for SMS usage through an Azure Communication Services resource (we currently don’t have any data for this modality):

The Email tab displays delivery status, email size, and email count:

The Recording tab displays data relevant to total recordings, recording format, recording channel types and number of recording per call:

The Call Automation tab displays data about calls placed or answered using Call Automation SDK, like active call count, operations executed and errors encountered by your resource over time. You can also examine a particular call by looking at the sequence of operations taken on that call using the SDK:

Editing dashboards

The Insights dashboards provided with your Communication Service resource can be customized by clicking on the Edit button on the top navigation bar:

Editing these dashboards does not modify the Insights tab, but rather creates a separate workbook which can be accessed on your resource’s Workbooks tab:

For an in-depth description of workbooks, please refer to the Azure Monitor Workbooks documentation.