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Managing Video Quality with the QoS Analytics Meetings report

Last updated on February 14, 2022

Troubleshooting using QoS Meetings dashboard

Video provides you with seamless video to connect with your team anywhere. But every once in a while, you might receive complaints about a meeting session. Quality of Service (QoS) Analytics can help you pinpoint the root cause and resolve the issue.

Before you open the Analytics Portal, we want to share our IT Team’s methodology for troubleshooting for a meeting session.

Check personal settings:
- Peripherals: Are peripheral devices properly attached, set up, and functioning? For example, is the user using headphones for the best experience?
- CPU/Memory usage: Does the user have many apps running in the background during the meeting?
Check device’s internet connection:
- Network Type: Is the network setup optimal? For example, is the device connected to a stable network?
- Signal Strength: Is the device getting a strong network signal? Are there any lags in signal strength throughout the connections?
Check access point:
- Network congestion: Are a lot of people connected to the same network? Are they consuming a lot of bandwidth?
Check Location/ISP: Is there any outage in the location or with the ISP?

Once you have your plan, log into Analytics to get the answers.

Accessing QoS Analytics

You can access QoS Analytics via multiple gateways.

By directly accessing the Analytics portal
Via your online account
- Click on Analytics under Reports tab in your account
- Once in the Analytics portal, select Quality of Service in the left navigation bar

Via the app
- Click on the Analytics icon in the left navigation bar, which will redirect you to the Analytics portal
- Once in the Analytics Portal, select Quality of Service from the navigation bar

Troubleshooting using QoS Meetings dashboard

Meetings dashboard

When you are in QoS Analytics, you can go to the Meetings dashboard to locate and troubleshoot a specific meeting or session.

Find the meeting session by searching for the user name or the meeting ID. Open the meeting session to see detailed information in one view.

Quality metric

Quality metric shows you the overall quality of a stream, which can be Good, Moderate or Poor.

Audio quality is calculated using jitter, latency and packet loss.

Video and Screen share quality is calculated using:

Requested resolution, available resolution, actual resolution
Requested FPS, available FPS, actual FPS

Media Signals

You can view media signals both as average view or in timeline view. You can also see the trend of the values in the trend graph. Media signals with moderate or poor values will be highlighted in red or orange colors. Thresholds for the quality can be found in the tooltip next to each media signal.

Media signal	Stream type	Definition and impact	Potential root causes for issues
Packet Loss	Audio Video Screenshare	Bits that were lost during streaming because it has not reached its destination. Packet Loss will cause someone’s video to be frozen, have pink dots, etc., and will cause choppy audio.	Network congestion, device performance, etc.
Jitter	Audio	When there is a time delay in the sending of the data packets over your network connection. A higher level of jitter can cause connectivity problems such as static and echoes, distortion and choppy audio.	Network congestion, router changes.
Delay	Audio Video Screenshare	Round Trip time plus playout delay.	Server location, network congestion, etc.
Bitrate	Audio Video Screenshare	The number of bits that are conveyed or processed in a given unit of time.	Bandwidth, speed of internet.
FPS	Video Screenshare	Frames per second. The higher the resolution and FPS, the higher the bitrate it requires.	Bandwidth, FPS from source, CPU/memory utilization.
Resolution	Video Screenshare	The number of horizontal lines in a video frame. If the resolution is low but the video frame is high, the video needs to be scaled up, and the video quality becomes suboptimal.	Bandwidth, resolution from source, etc.

Network Quality Indicator (NQI)

NQI indicates network quality during the meeting session. It’s the same metric shown in the App during the meeting.

NQI is calculated using these metrics:

Audio: Packet Loss, RTT and Jitter
Video and Screen share: Packet Loss and RTT

Events timeline

The Events timeline includes changes the user makes during a meeting session. You can use the events timeline and media signal timeline view to identify correlation between events and quality of the media signal. For example:

Changing network type (WiFi - LTE) could impact NQI, thus quality of meeting.
Turning on video will increase bitrate requirement, and with limited bandwidth, it could affect overall meeting quality.

CPU and Memory Utilization

CPU and Memory Utilization can be affected by certain events such as having too many applications running in the background. High CPU/Memory utilization will affect FPS and, in turn, meeting quality.

Session Details

Session Details provide an overview of user setting, network details and user feedback for a session.

You can use session detail to identify, for example, whether the user:

is on the latest version of the app
is using headphones
has any network changes during the session

FAQ

Why is packet loss not considered in calculating video or screen share quality?

Packet losses can be compensated by using different tools like NACK and FEC, so packet losses don't directly affect the quality. Also, video freezes caused by packet loss are better indicated by frame rate decrease, which is included in the quality calculation for video and screen share quality.

Why do I see poor sent streams on video/screen share even if I don’t see any poor media signals in the stream?

It could be that a viewer requested higher resolution, but the actual sent resolution was lower, resulting in poorer sent stream quality because it didn’t satisfy the viewer’s requests.

Why do I see poor FPS in the video stream, but the stream quality is good?

FPS has static thresholds for quality, i.e., if FPS is lower than 12, it is of poor quality. However, this may be due to the sent stream having low FPS. If the stream quality is good with a poor FPS value, it means that the problem is with the sender of the video stream. That’s why the service Vodafone Business UC provides for the received stream is still of good quality.

We hope this review helps you understand QoS Analytics and more effectively troubleshoot for your meeting sessions.