In the past months Microsoft Cloud PBX started offering more features and more customer decided to start migrating some user or the entire organization to the Microsoft cloud Voice System.
I collaborated with some of the Microsoft partners on Cloud PBX implementations and one of the most requested information from the Operation team and Management, is reporting
There are some different tool you can or cannot use, depending whether you use PSTN Calling service or Hybrid/Cloud Connector Edition solutions.
With this post, I’d like to clarify the available reports and which type of information you can find.
Skype for Business Portal reports
As an O365 Skype for Business Administrator you can use a rich number of reports provided out of the box.
A complete and updated list is available at the link https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Skype-for-Business-Online-reporting-4935cddf-fafa-442d-91a3-246af01f8373.
For the purpose of this post, I’d like to focus on the Skype for Business PSTN usage report ( https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Skype-for-Business-PSTN-usage-report-74eda791-c41f-4fd9-ae0b-913342e7ab04 )
Differently from what you can imagine, this report only shows call for users who use the Microsoft PSTN calling service or the calls received by CallQueue or AutoAttendant.
If you are in a Hybrid or Cloud Connector Scenario, you won’t see any calls in this report and you need to use one of the following methods to extract CDR or Quality information.
Call Analytics
Call Analysis is similar to the “users report” you were used to have on-premise (CDR and QoE) and can provide a deep-dive analysis to help troubleshoot problematic calls from a simple and clear user interface. The tool is accessible at the following link: https://adminportal.services.skypeforbusiness.com.
By default, two levels of access can be granted (Tier 1 and Tier 2 Help Desk) with different level permission level.
This tool is meant to drill down specific calls for a specific user and doesn’t allow you to search for multiple users.
This report shows both Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling Plan user as well as Cloud PBX with CCE/Hybrid PSTN breakout.
More information are available at: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Skype-for-Business-Blog/Introducing-Call-Analytics/ba-p/57309
PowerShell Report
In case you need to export all the user sessions details information for a considerable list of users, the Call Analytics tool might not be the right tool because you can get sessions only for a specific users and you can’t export data.
To avoid this problem, you can use the PowerShell command Get-CsUserSession.
It’s providing all the information you can get from the Call Analytics tool, but since it uses PowerShell, you can script it and automate to export data for different users.
The PowerShell cmdlet can also be used to make statistic about client version used on the environment, number of call failed with a specific error code, etc..
At today, the last 1000 entries per users are extracted by the cmdlet. If the extracted information is not enough, you need to limit the interval playing with -StartTime and –EndTime
parameters.
More information are available at: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Skype-for-Business-Blog/Troubleshoot-individual-calls-in-Skype-for-Business-Online/ba-p/30707
This report uses the VQReport Event generated by the client when a specific session ends. For this reason, every Skype for business online users call/meeting is listed in the export, no matter if the user has a PSTN Calling plan or uses a Hybrid/CCE solution.
Legacy PBX / SBC reports
Every PBX or SBC vendor provides the possibility to Extract CDR information. Some vendor has embedded tools, other relays to additional components (dedicated database, Radius server, syslog, etc..).
Despite that, if you are in a Hybrid or Cloud Connector environment and you don’t want to use O365 tool, you can retrieve all the call received or placed by your users directly from the CDR report generated by the SBC or PBX.
Call Quality Dashboard report
Call quality Dashboard is useful tool designed to better understand the overall quality of a Skype for business environment.
CQD exists both on-premise and online and uses Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services to provide aggregate usage and call quality information as well as filtering and pivoting on the data set.
It’s designed to understand trend and get information about the global service quality and not to drill down to specific call.
The amazing aspect about this tool that it’s free and ready to
use (for online environment). You just need to configure the environment information, configure custom report (if needed) and use it!
There are four interesting introduction sessions about CDQ on the Skype Operation Framework materials.
You can start having a look at the following readiness video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOfA41iMLCM
Having a clear understanding of the environment performance, is crucial for every voice project and help you to proactively identify issues that might have a bigger impact if ignored.
I strongly recommend investing time on the Operation phase to guarantee an optimal service quality.
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