Microsoft Skype For Business Network Assessment Tool Download
Amancio Mccrae
This is a very basic tool that runs in either the command prompt or PowerShell with elevated privileges. The tool is designed to test the network performance between your laptop/PC and the Skype for Business Online Network Edge. It checks for latency, packet loss and jitter (all of the things that might make a call using Skype for Business Online terrible).
The usage doc tells you that the target for these metrics should meet the published targets for Skype for Business network targets listed here. If you want to compare the results against the website, you can do. However there is also an additional tool that checks for you. This is the ResultsAnalyzer.
To run the ResultsAnalyzer.exe application you also need to reference the results file.
I assume that the application is only designed only to communicate with the Skype for Business Online network Edge somehow. Not to worry though, if you do want to check connectivity to your own deployment, whether on-premises or Online you can still use the Connectivity analyzer.
Update:
James Cussen, Office Servers and Services MVP aka @MyLyncLab and creator of some of the most useful tools for Lync and Skype for Business has a new tool. This is a GUI for the Network Assessment Tool. Called Network Assessor for Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. Check it out here.
This topic defines the set of network performance requirements for Microsoft Teams services and how you can choose to use the Internet or ExpressRoute for connectivity between your network and Microsoft Teams based your assessment of the network connectivity. If you have decided to deploy Azure ExpressRoute for dedicated connectivity to Microsoft 365 or Office 365, this document also provides guidance on how to plan your ExpressRoute connections in different Microsoft Teams deployment scenarios.
Although this topic provides you with overall networking performance guidance, complete guidance for network assessment is outside of the scope of this document. To find a list of Microsoft Teams partners who can help you with the network performance measurements as part of a thorough and complete network assessment, please visit Skype for Business Partner Solutions.
With many concurrent Microsoft Teams Real-Time media sessions, and other network traffic generated by other Microsoft 365 or Office 365 services and other business applications, making sure that there is sufficient bandwidth over the entire network path that connects your network to the Microsoft Teams service is critical to avoid network congestion and ensure excellent media Real-Time media (audio, video, and application sharing) quality.
To measure the actual network performance, especially for latency and packet loss, from any company network site to a network Edge, you can use tools such as ping, test against a set of Skype for Business media relay services running from the Microsoft Edge and data center sites.
You should assess and gather data for all of your networks over a long period of time. We recommend for you to perform your testing of network performance for a minimum of a week, so that you can see usage patterns for all business days and hours. This will show you peak times.
Instead of testing against the Microsoft network Edge sites, there are network assessment solutions from Skype for Business customers and partners that use testing setup for services in the Microsoft Azure cloud. In those solutions, the network assessment tools test latency, packet loss and jitter against custom endpoints set up as a service in the Azure cloud. As a result, the test network traffic travels through one other network segment, which is the connection within the Microsoft network between the network edges and Azure data centers that hosts the network assessment service.
For those network assessment solutions based on Azure hosted testing services. We recommend performing the network assessment within country and/or region. For example, for customer sites in east U.S., the assessment should be performed against a testing service instance hosted in Azure's east US data center region.
Below are the latency (RTT) targets for the Azure service-based network assessment setup. The one-way latency targets will be half of the corresponding RTT targets. The packet loss and jitter goals stay the same as those defined for Skype Media Relay based testing.
In the following example, Contoso is a large corporate law firm with offices in major cities across North America and Europe. Based on their Internet connection and their internal network performance assessment, Contoso decided to deploy two ExpressRoute connections in North America and a single ExpressRoute circuit for all their European offices.
Network evaluations can be performed by many different people and organizations depending on your size and preferences. The network scope of the assessment can also vary depending on where you're at in your deployment process. To help you get a better understanding of what it takes to perform a network assessment, we've produced a network assessment guide to help you understand the options available to you. This assessment determines what steps and resources need to be added to the deployment project to enable you to successfully adopt Microsoft 365.
A comprehensive network assessment provides possible solutions to networking design challenges along with implementation details. Some network assessments show that optimal network connectivity to Microsoft 365 can be accommodated with minor configuration or design changes to the existing network and internet egress infrastructure.
Some assessments indicate network connectivity to Microsoft 365 will require additional investments in networking components. For example, enterprise networks that span branch offices and multiple geographic regions might require investments in SD-WAN solutions or optimized routing infrastructure to support internet connectivity to Microsoft 365. Occasionally an assessment indicates network connectivity to Microsoft 365 is influenced by regulation or performance requirements for scenarios such as Skype for Business Online media quality. These additional requirements might lead to investments in internet connectivity infrastructure, routing optimization, and specialized direct connectivity.
When considering using Microsoft 365 for any of the included services such as Teams or Skype for Business Online voice, video, or meeting capabilities, customers should complete an end to end network assessment and meet connectivity requirements using Microsoft FastTrack.
If you're evaluating Microsoft 365 and aren't sure where to begin with your network assessment or have found network design challenges that you need assistance to overcome, work with your Microsoft account team.
The Microsoft 365 connectivity test is a proof of concept (POC) network assessment tool that runs basic connectivity tests against your Microsoft 365 tenant and makes specific network design recommendations for optimal Microsoft 365 performance. The tool highlights common large enterprise network perimeter design choices that are useful for Internet web browsing but impact the performance of large SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365.
The tool has two components: a browser-based UI that collects basic connectivity information, and a downloadable Windows 10 application that runs advanced tests and returns additional assessment data.
You can read about the Microsoft 365 connectivity test and provide feedback at the Updated Microsoft 365 connectivity test POC with new network design recommendations blog post. Information about future updates to this tool and other Microsoft 365 networking updates will be posted to the Microsoft 365 Networking blog.
It is important to remember what we talked about at the start, this MS tool is NOT designed to simulate true real-world scenarios, the call volumes are too low & the call duration is to short. What it will do is give you an indication of the sutiability of your underlying network infrastructure!
If you are in the process of migrating from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams for the first time, in that case, always is a best practice to execute the network assessment tool to identify any possible bottleneck in your internal network.
A core component of the Skype Operations Framework is performing assessments to determine network readiness. Factors such as network latency, packet loss, bandwidth and peak traffic loads are critical for ensuring success. The SOF mandates Skype traffic simulation using the Network Assessment Tool or other tools as part of their Plan, Deliver, and Operate guidelines:
While improvements are likely planned for the Network Assessment Tool, CloudReady Skype Sensors are easier and more accurate for network assessment, testing and load simulation. The SOF recommends the tests be re-run anytime network changes are performed.
The Network Assessment Tool is designed to be run manually each time for a duration. Re-running the assessment tool must be automated and coordinated across different endpoints and the data has to be manually collected and aggregated.
The Network Assessment Tool that is part of the SOF only tests the Skype Media Stack. There is no support for simulating other network loads or stress within the environment. The SOF recommends periodically running the tool at representative times during peak network traffic or similar.
Latency is the time it takes to get an IP packet from point A to Point B on the network. As opposed to other network test tools which might just ping a network interface with ICMP, the CloudReady sensors gather the latency statistics as seen by the real Skype for Business Clients. This is the same metric that is captured and measured in the historical Call Quality Reports. The difference with the CloudReady Skype sensors is that this metric captured proactively before an end-user experiences poor latency between network segments.
3a7c801d34