ENSURING TEAMS PERFORMANCE

WHEN IT'S ONEDRIVE,

SHAREPOINT AND EXCHANGE
UNDER THE HOOD
By Nick Cavalancia, Microsoft MVP

1
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

It’s probably safe to assume that nearly every meeting you attend today uses some
form of videoconference solution. Whether you have your camera on or not, one
of the side effects of the pandemic has been the need to connect – both from a
technical perspective and a human one. In-person meetings are now uncommon
and often meetings, training, and collaborative efforts take place on
communications and collaboration applications such as Microsoft Teams.

Even before the pandemic, with its user-centric means to allow groups of people
to work together online, Teams was already gaining steam as the collaborative
application of choice. Microsoft Teams jumped 70 percent to 75 million daily active
users by the end of April. To know what that actually looks like, Microsoft saw 200
million meeting participates in a single day in the month of April. Teams
functionality matched the need of organizations to keep workers connected,
which meant that heavily relying on Teams became a core part of their business
operations.

This increased reliance on Teams has not only been seen in the corporate world
where collaboration is an essential function of the business. According to
Microsoft’s latest earning call, over 150 million teachers are working daily with
students on Teams, there are over 46 million Teams meetings monthly by
healthcare organizations globally, and sixty-nine of the largest enterprises each
have more than 100,000 Teams users within their respective organizations.

In short, Teams is important, and everyone is using it.

This dependency upon Teams makes it a critical application; for some

organizations, it’s the most critical. That means users require it to perform well and
consistently. If the application doesn’t, teachers can’t teach effectively, patients
can’t get the remote access to doctors they need, and enterprises with disparate
workforces have no ability to easily collaborate.

For most Microsoft 365 applications, monitoring performance of a service, like

Exchange Online, revolves around focusing on Exchange-related services, logs,
etc., with the potential need to include a few servers for complete visibility. In the
case of Teams, ensuring its performance is more complex – one that may prove to
be impossible with native tools.

In this paper, we’ll look at the components that make up Microsoft Teams, how
each component can contribute to service issues and performance degradation,
as well as discuss ways you can gain the visibility needed to isolate the source of
Teams performance issues.

2
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

Teams Is More Than Just Teams

One of the unique challenges with Teams is
that it’s more a platform than its own Microsoft
365 service. Microsoft provides its customers
with a great front-end experience in the various
Teams apps. Through them, Teams facilitates
collaboration, communication, sharing of
documents, and integration with other 3rd
party applications – all to give its users an ability
to work with their coworkers in one place.

Behind the scenes, it’s MUCH different than any

other Microsoft 365 service. That’s because Teams on the backend isn’t Teams at
all. Teams utilizes a number of other Microsoft 365 services, processing and storing
data across the Microsoft 365 cloud.

When Teams Is Really Exchange

There are a number of functions in Teams that, under the hood, are actually
performed within Exchange on-premises and Exchange Online:

 Team and Channel management

 Creating and viewing meetings

 Modifying the user profile picture

 Reviewing Call History

 Managing Contacts

 Accessing Outlook Contacts

In addition, message and voice mail message data from Teams do get ingested
into Exchange for compliance reasons.

When Teams is Really SharePoint or OneDrive for Business

For every group created within Teams, a SharePoint site and a corresponding
Shared Documents folder are created. Any files shared within a conversation are
automatically added to the document library. Despite the fact that OneDrive is a
front-end service that runs on SharePoint, there is some direct interaction between
Teams and OneDrive, where files shared as part of a Private Chat are stored within
OneDrive for Business in the Microsoft Teams Chat Files folder.

3
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

While a user is interacting with the Teams application, most of the magic occurring
requires the cooperative assistance of several services within the Microsoft 365
cloud. In addition to the interdependencies outlined above, there are also other
uses of Microsoft Stream, Azure’s Cosmos DB, and Azure Blob storage as well by
Teams. Since there is little-to-no ability to monitor those services, we’ll focus our
energies on the three very prominent applications: Exchange, SharePoint, and
OneDrive for Business being heavily relied upon.

Teams Performance Can Easily Be Impacted

With Teams reliant upon so many other services, it’ s easy to see how the user-
experienced performance of Teams, or worse – its service availability – can be
impacted. Since most of the time, the issue is Exchange, SharePoint, or OneDrive
for Business, lots of common issues are not a result of a problem with Teams itself,
such as:

 Chat not responding but providing a status of “looking for new messages”

 Not being able to upload or access files in certain Channels

 Not being able to create new Channels

 Messages not showing up in Teams after receiving a notification

until 1-2 minutes later

 Simply can’t access content

Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center

These may be leading indicators of issues with either Teams connectivity to

Exchange, SharePoint, or OneDrive for Business, or reflects a problem with one of
those services. Microsoft does provide a means for you to view the current health

4
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

status of their various services in the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Health >
Service health.

You can also look at third-party websites like Downdetector that offer not just the
current status of services like Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications, but also
historical issues. If you operate in the minority and still use Exchange on-premises,
Teams can use it, but you have even less built-in tools to provide visibility into
potential service and connectivity issues that can cause perceived problems within
Teams.

Also keep in mind, the actual problem can also be any part of the connection
between the user and Teams including the client they’re using, their home WiFi,
their available Internet bandwidth, whether they route through a company VPN or
hit Microsoft 365 directly, and more.

So, how do you solve performance issues when identifying the problem likely has
nothing to do with Teams?

Getting Teams to Perform When It’s Not

Teams That’s the Problem
The challenge of maintaining Teams performance is that any one necessary
backend service or application that isn’t available or is having issues can bring
Teams to its knees. Whether it’s Microsoft having a service delivery issue or one of
their many frequent updates having a problem when put into production- one
small issue and Teams is down.

The other challenge is the lack of visibility needed; sure there’s the built in logs,
auditing, and consoles, but internal IT needs to have insight into where the
problem lies – no matter where it lies. This puts Microsoft’s own toolsets at a distinct
disadvantage. Yes, they provide basic visibility into their services, but remember,
Microsoft is the service provider here and they are trying to make a platform you
can use and not have to troubleshoot. Even so, your organization still looks to you
and your team to “fix” the current problem with Teams. While we all know you have
no ability to fix a problem with Microsoft 365, identifying where the problem lies –
particularly when working with Microsoft (should the source of the performance
issue be some part of Microsoft 365) – will help speed up the resolution process. In
contrast, if the perceived Teams issue is actually due to an improper internal VPN
configuration, you obviously can fix that yourself.

5
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

Using Synthetic Transactions

One possible method of gaining the necessary visibility into every facet of the
Teams architecture and user experience is through the use of synthetic
transactions. Solutions that monitor Microsoft 365 services (in both native cloud
and hybrid modes) with synthetic transactions can create complete end-to-end
visibility that takes into account the services used by Teams on the backend.

With synthetic transactions and Teams, user interactions with Teams, Exchange,
SharePoint, and OneDrive are mimicked and monitored. Organizations
monitoring solutions that use synthetic transactions have visibility into
performance issues and root causes of problems through the use of experiential
metrics that represent real user activity. This data translates into performance and
service quality details that can be used to help identify whether the problem is
Microsoft or not and, if it is, which service is experiencing issues.

So, let’s walk through the areas you need to be monitoring that can be the source
of performance issues in Teams, highlighting the actual service responsible.

Endpoint / Teams Client

You can’t just assume it’s the Microsoft 365 cloud that’s causing the problem.
Microsoft updates their web client weekly, and their desktop client (which updates
itself automatically) every two weeks. It’s possible that this can be a factor. Also
being able to distinguish which client is in use, the kind of connectivity the
endpoint uses, and which network path they take to connect to Teams are just
some of the other details that help to identify who is having a problem, where they
are located, and any other common factors that could indicate why there is a
performance problem.

Exchange

Since Teams’ most visible use of Exchange revolves around

scheduling meetings, your concern here is both at a 10,000-foot
level (that is, are the Exchange services running?) and in the details
(that is, is Exchange functioning and performing well? e.g., can you
create calendar entries?, are message queues backed up?, etc.). The
former is available online in Microsoft 365‘s Service health, but the latter requires
granular visibility that will require third-party solutions, including Exchange
monitoring solutions and those utilizing synthetic transactions.

6
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

SharePoint Online

As files are created within Teams, a SharePoint document library is

being updated. So, as with Exchange, it’s necessary to understand
whether SharePoint is running, and know that it’s ability to process
document library requests works. The only way to validate such
specific SharePoint functionality is through synthetic transactions
designed to hit your SharePoint servers, testing the very same types of user actions
that Teams is performing.

OneDrive for Business

Files shared in a Private Chat go in a user’s OneDrive folder, over a

SharePoint document library in order to preserve the user-centric
context of the file. In this case, monitoring both the OneDrive for
Business and SharePoint services are necessary to get a complete
picture of service availability. However, testing SharePoint’s ability to save and
retrieve files is enough to verify functionality.

Monitoring Teams for Performance

Much of the detail covered in this paper feels like it leans towards service
availability over performance. Depending on the monitoring solutions used, the
service and user transaction data can be analyzed in real-time to identify slow-
downs in performance – even before users recognize it as a problem.

The most critical factor in trying to keep Teams performing, is to realize how very
dependent it is upon Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business and how
you really are needing to watch those services over Teams itself. By understanding
the relationship and interactions between Teams and its supporting services, and
how these interactions show themselves in very tangible ways to the user, it will
become evident of just how important it is to find ways to continually monitor the
services and their functionality.

Teams is a unique creature with all its inherent complexities. Given its importance
to the organization, it’s imperative that you find ways to monitor its performance,
all of its performance, regardless of which service is involved. By keeping an eye
on all the components that make up Teams down to the level of user interactions,
you will have a better understanding of the scope of a degradation in service, why
it’s occurring, who it impacts, and what you can do about it.

7
Ensuring Microsoft Teams Performance

About the author

Nick Cavalancia is a Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVP and has
over 25 years of IT experience dealing with the architecture,
implementation, and training of Microsoft technologies to
enterprise customers.
Nick has attained industry certifications including MCSE, MCT,
MCNE, and MCNI. He has authored, co-authored and contributed
to over a dozen books on Windows, Active Directory, Exchange and other
Microsoft technologies and has spoken at many technical conferences on a wide
variety of topics.

About Martello
Martello Technologies Group Inc. (TSXV: MTLO) is a technology company that
provides digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions. The company develops
products and solutions that provide monitoring and analytics on the
performance of real-time applications on networks, while giving IT teams and
service providers control and visibility of their entire IT infrastructure. Martello’s
products include unified communications performance analytics software, and
IT analytics software.

Martello Technologies Group is a public company headquartered in Ottawa,

Canada with offices in Montreal, Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Nice, Dallas and
New York.

Martello Technologies Corporation

390 March Road, Suite 110 | Ottawa, Ontario K2K 0G7
North America: +1-613-271-5989
Europe: 0041 22 735 82 40
info@martellotech.com
www.martellotech.com