Metrics to monitor in Microsoft Teams for reliable performance
Microsoft Teams is the backbone of communication and collaboration for many organizations. With employees relying on it for messaging, meetings, calls, and file sharing, even the smallest of performance hiccups can quickly affect productivity. Slow logins, audio drops, or delayed messages frustrate users and force IT to scramble for a fix.
To prevent this, IT teams need continuous visibility into Microsoft Teams and its dependent Microsoft 365 services, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), and the underlying network and authentication services that support Teams. ManageEngine Applications Manager offers Microsoft Teams monitoring that helps you analyze performance insights, get easy alerts, and build interactive, customizable dashboards that help detect problems before they impact end users.
Let’s break down the Microsoft Teams metrics that have the biggest impact on users and see why keeping an eye on them is crucial.
Why visibility into Microsoft Teams performance matters
Even though Microsoft hosts the infrastructure, the end-user experienceof Microsoft Teams and its dependent services is still your responsibility. Issues can occur anywhere: network congestion, local configuration issues, authentication failures, or service degradation from Microsoft’s side.
Monitoring Microsoft Teams helps you:
Detect issues early.
Locate the root cause faster.
Understand usage patterns.
Plan resource capacity.
Reduce downtime and complaints.
Applications Manager centralizes your Microsoft Teams performance insights including service health, call quality, usage trends, and alerts into a single console for faster decision-making.
Service health status
To start, you need to track whether Microsoft Teams and its related services are running as expected. If Microsoft has an outage, it will affect all users instantly.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Microsoft Teams service status | Helps quickly identify whether issues are internal or due to a Microsoft-side outage. |
Advisories or incidents | Enables proactive communication to users and faster incident response. |
Health of connected services like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange | Since Microsoft Teams rely on these services for files, chat history, and meetings, any degradation directly impacts user productivity. |
Applications Manager helps correlate failures across dependent services, so IT doesn’t waste time chasing the wrong issue.
User activity and engagement
Usage insights help IT teams track user activity and engagement by showing how many users adopt a feature, how frequently they use it, and whether that engagement grows or declines.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Daily and monthly active users | Highlights adoption trends and flags anomalies when user activity unexpectedly drops. |
Chat volume | Helps detect communication bottlenecks or sudden inactivity due to login failures or outages. |
Meeting and call participation | Indicates productivity patterns and uncovers audio or video performance issues. |
File collaboration usage | Shows how effectively users are leveraging Microsoft Teams for collaboration and reveals file access problems. |
Device types (e.g., desktop, browser, mobile) | Helps troubleshoot device-specific issues and optimize support based on user preferences. |
Applications Manager visualizes engagement trends and alerts IT instantly when adoption or activity drops unexpectedly.
Call and meeting quality
If audio or video call quality in Microsoft Teams begins to degrade, it will immediately impact collaboration. Call telemetry helps identify poor user experiences before they become widespread.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Packet loss | Identifies network reliability issues affecting calls. |
Latency | Detects delays that cause poor audio or video experience. |
Jitter | Highlights fluctuating network conditions impacting real-time media. |
Dropped calls | Detects instability in call performance to address root causes quickly. |
Bitrate variations | Helps diagnose bandwidth issues or regional service degradation. |
Applications Manager correlates call-quality metrics with network conditions and usage spikes to help IT determine the exact performance bottleneck.
Message delivery performance
Slow or failed message delivery is often an early indicator of deeper performance issues within your application or infrastructure. Monitoring message delivery performance helps teams detect bottlenecks, maintain system reliability, and ensure real-time communication flows smoothly.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Total messages sent/received | Tracks usage load and detects sudden drops in message flow. |
Delivery latency | Identifies delays affecting collaboration speed. Sudden change in delivery speed may indicate network congestion or back-end degradation. |
Message error rates | Helps detect back-end failures or network issues impacting message reliability. |
Throttling events | Shows when users hit rate limits, helping IT optimize performance or adjust policies. |
With Applications Manager, IT can quickly correlate these metrics with underlying infrastructure issues, enabling faster troubleshooting and ensuring seamless message delivery across your environment.
Device and client performance
Microsoft Teams is used across multiple usage environments, and sometimes issues may arise on only one device. Monitoring each device helps pinpoint the exact source of an issue.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Login time and responsiveness by device | Detects device-level performance issues before they impact many users. |
Call quality per client | Pinpoints whether performance issues come from the desktop app, browser, or mobile. |
OS or client version | Helps identify outdated versions causing recurring failures. |
Recurring failure patterns | Enables proactive fixes based on repeated device-specific errors. |
Applications Manager provides device-level telemetry that helps IT isolate whether issues stem from a specific OS, client version, or device type.
Authentication and login reliability
If users are blocked from signing into Microsoft Teams, core productivity stops immediately. Microsoft Teams relies entirely on the sign-in process, which is the perfect place to monitor for identity issues. Proactively monitoring Microsoft Entra ID and tracking other authentication parameters will help you identify issues early.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Login failure rates | Quickly reveals authentication outages or misconfigurations. |
Sign-in duration | Detects slow login experiences impacting productivity. |
Conditional access issues | Helps identify policy-related blocks preventing user access. |
Microsoft Entra ID service availability | Confirms whether identity services are the cause of login problems. |
Applications Manager monitors Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Teams authentication paths to quickly help IT determine whether login failures originate from identity services or internal policies.
License usage and capacity
Licensing is essential for maintaining user access and controlling costs. Monitoring usage helps you prevent users from being denied access when licenses run out and keeps spending in check.
Metrics to monitor | Why it matters |
Active vs. available licenses | Prevents users from being blocked due to license shortages. |
Unused licenses | Helps reduce unnecessary spending. |
Growth trends | Supports proactive license planning based on real usage. |
Departments nearing capacity | Ensures teams don’t hit license limits during peak demand. |
Applications Manager offers license utilization dashboards and alerts to help IT plan capacity, prevent shortages, and optimize license spending.
How does Applications Manager support Microsoft Teams monitor?
Applications Manager enhances Microsoft Teams observability with deep performance insights, proactive alerts, and end-to-end visibility across your collaboration environment. It helps IT teams ensure uninterrupted communication and faster issue resolution through:
Comprehensive real-time dashboards that track call quality, meeting performance, user activity, message flows, and Microsoft 365 service health in one view.
Proactive, intelligent alerting that detects latency spikes, API failures, service degradation, or connectivity issues before they impact end users.
Dependency mapping and correlation to understand how Teams performance is influenced by underlying services such as Microsoft 365 workloads, network components, and authentication services.
Detailed historical reporting and trend analysis to identify recurring issues, analyze usage patterns, and forecast capacity requirements for better planning.
Unified visibility acrosscloud, on-premises, andhybrid environments, enabling teams to quickly pinpoint root causes without switching between multiple tools.
Actionable insights for troubleshooting, reducing mean time to resolution and helping maintain high service uptime and seamless collaboration experiences.
With these capabilities, Applications Manager empowers organizations to deliver consistent, reliable Microsoft Teams performance while minimizing disruptions for end users.
Ready to up your monitoring?
Microsoft Teams is a mission-critical collaboration platform, and ensuring its performance directly impacts business productivity. By tracking essential KPIs - service health, meeting quality, message delivery speed, user activity, authentication, and licensing, gain control over the user experience in your organization.
With Applications Manager, you can proactively detect issues, analyze trends, and ensure that Microsoft Teams remains reliable and high performing at scale. Try it today!