EMS 8.7: Proactive Microsoft Teams Monitoring for Call Quality, Connectivity, and User Experience

EMS 8.7 helps IT teams detect Teams connectivity and performance problems earlier, validate critical user workflows, and troubleshoot issues faster.

Why Microsoft Teams Monitoring Has to Go Beyond Service Health

Microsoft Teams can show as available in the Microsoft 365 admin center while your users can't join a call from the Denver office. IT and UC teams and administrators get measured on the second part: whether people can actually join meetings and find each other from the offices and networks they work on.

The challenge is that many Microsoft Teams problems are degradations rather than complete outages. Calls may connect with poor quality. Meetings may fail to create. Users may be unable to find colleagues. Network changes may affect only one office or subset of users.

Teams also depends on a long chain of services: network connectivity, media transport, Microsoft Graph, Exchange, identity, and directory services. When one link breaks, Microsoft Teams troubleshooting turns into a hunt across consoles to find the failure and the admin team that owns it.

What Microsoft 365 Service Health Can't Tell You About Teams

Microsoft's service health dashboard and basic availability checks tell you whether Microsoft 365 is broadly up. During a real incident, administrators need answers to questions like these:

• Is Teams actually working for our users right now?
• Is call quality degrading even though calls still connect?
• Is the issue Microsoft, our network, or a specific office?
• Can users successfully create meetings, access calendars, and find coworkers?
• Which dependency failed: Teams, Exchange, authentication, directory services, or the network?
• Have Microsoft's endpoint changes created gaps in our firewall or proxy configuration?
• Who has access to our Teams, including external guests and guest owners?

Without those answers, the first alert is usually a user ticket, and the next hour goes to manual troubleshooting across Teams, Exchange, Entra ID, and the network.

What's New in ENow EMS 8.7 for Microsoft Teams Monitoring

EMS 8.7 significantly expands ENow’s Microsoft Teams monitoring beyond individual service and chat availability, adding proactive network and media-path testing, synthetic user transactions, and deeper governance availability.

The release introduces three major areas of capability:

Network & Media Path Monitoring

Monitor the network paths and Microsoft services Teams depends on, including media transport, service connectivity, endpoint reachability, and Microsoft configuration changes.

Synthetic Teams Transactions

Continuously exercise important Teams workflows, including meeting creation, calendar integration, Exchange dependencies, and user search, before users report a problem.

Teams Governance & Visibility

Improve visibility into Teams membership and ownership, particularly external users and guests, while making alerts easier for IT teams to investigate and remediate.

EMS 8.7 also retires the EWS logon test and moves EWS-based checks to Microsoft Graph. Details are in the EWS section below.

How EMS 8.7 Helps You Find Teams Problems Before Users Do

Identify Teams Call Quality Problems Before the Call Starts

Traditional call-quality data can tell you what happened after a Teams call has already started or ended. But by then, the user has already experienced the problem.

EMS 8.7 takes a more proactive approach.

New Teams Service Connectivity and Transport Relay Connectivity tests continuously validate the network and media conditions Teams depends on for calls and meetings. If those paths are already degraded, IT can identify the conditions likely to impact call quality before users join a meeting or place a call.

It also validates six individual Teams service groups and separates DNS failures from HTTP failures, giving IT a much more specific starting point than "Teams is slow."

New capabilities include:

• Teams service connectivity testing across six service groups (Call controller, Conversation, Chat, Trouter, Broker, and CDN).
• Transport relay connectivity and QoS testing
• Enhanced Teams endpoint and URL reachability testing
• Testing from ENow's Microsoft 365 service, ECLOUD (ENow’s cloud-hosted test locations), and remote probes within customer locations

Isolate Whether a Teams Problem Is Microsoft, Your Network, or One Office

A Teams issue affecting one office can look very different from a Microsoft-wide incident.

EMS runs Teams network tests from multiple vantage points, including probes deployed within your own offices. This helps IT determine whether degradation is occurring within Microsoft's service, across the broader network path, or only at a particular location.

EMS also monitors Microsoft's published Teams IP and URL configuration for changes, helping identify allowlist drift before new or changed endpoints begin dropping traffic.

You know where to start troubleshooting before you open a ticket with Microsoft or your network team.

Test Teams Meetings and User Search with Synthetic Transactions

A green service-health status does not prove that users can complete the workflows they depend on.

EMS 8.7 adds synthetic transactions that exercise Teams the way users do. It can create and retrieve a Teams online meeting through Microsoft Graph, validate Teams meeting creation through Outlook calendar integration, and confirm the underlying Exchange dependencies are ready.

New synthetic monitoring includes:

• Create and retrieve an online Teams meeting
• Validate Teams calendar integration
• Test Teams and Exchange dependency readiness
• Validate internal user search and direct user lookup

These tests catch workflow failures before the first user opens a ticket.

Find the Layer That Failed: Authentication, Exchange, Graph, Teams, or Network

Teams incidents frequently cross service boundaries. A meeting problem could originate with authentication, Exchange, calendar access, Microsoft Graph, Teams itself, or the network.

EMS 8.7 measures individual stages of key transactions, including authentication, mailbox access, calendar access, meeting generation, retrieval, and cleanup.

When a transaction fails, EMS shows which stage failed.

Teams alert categories also now link directly to relevant ENow knowledge-base guidance, giving administrators troubleshooting information directly from the alert.

The result: Less time proving whose problem it is, more time fixing the actual problem.

Report on Teams Guests and Guest Owners

Operational health is only one part of managing Teams. IT and security teams also need visibility into who has access to collaboration environments.

The Teams Members and Owners report now includes User Type in its default view and resolves guest display names, making it easier to distinguish internal users from external guests and identify guests holding owner roles.

The reporting also provides a point-in-time record of Teams membership and ownership that organizations can use to support periodic access reviews and broader governance and compliance processes.

EWS Changes in EMS 8.7: Retiring the EWS Logon Test and Moving to Microsoft Graph

Microsoft is retiring Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online in favor of Microsoft Graph. Starting October 1, 2026, EWS is blocked by default in any tenant that hasn't explicitly enabled it and allow-listed specific apps, and Microsoft removes EWS from Exchange Online entirely after April 2027 (Microsoft's EWS retirement timeline).

EMS 8.7 updates ENow's Exchange Online monitoring for that change:

• The EWS logon test is retired. Once Microsoft blocks EWS in your tenant, that test would fail no matter how healthy your mailboxes are, so it no longer tells you anything useful.
• EWS-based checks now run on Microsoft Graph. Graph uses modern authentication and scoped app permissions; the model Microsoft is moving every Microsoft 365 integration toward. The new Teams meeting and calendar tests in this release already run through Graph.

If your team is still inventorying which of your own apps depend on EWS, our guide on EWS deprecation in Exchange Online walks through finding EWS usage in your tenant and managing the EwsEnabled setting and app allow list.

See Microsoft Teams Monitoring in EMS 8.7

Microsoft 365 may show as available while your users are already experiencing degraded Teams performance.

With EMS 8.7, ENow Microsoft 365 Monitoring gives IT deeper visibility into Teams network and media performance, critical user workflows, service dependencies, and access, helping teams identify problems earlier and troubleshoot them faster.

Request a demo to see the new Microsoft Teams Monitoring capabilities in EMS 8.7 and how ENow can help you proactively monitor the Microsoft 365 services your users depend on every day.

Microsoft Teams Monitoring and Troubleshooting FAQ

How do you monitor Microsoft Teams performance?

Test Teams from the places your users work. Check the network and media path from each office, including transport relay connectivity and QoS, then add synthetic transactions such as creating a meeting or searching for a user. Service health alone only tells you whether Microsoft reports the service as up.

How do I troubleshoot Microsoft Teams call quality issues?

Start by finding where the degradation sits. Compare results from several locations: if only one office has poor calls, look at that site's network and firewall rules first. Check whether UDP 3478 to 3481 is open, since Teams falls back to TCP 443 when UDP is blocked, and calls get worse.

Why do Teams calls connect but sound bad?

The most common cause is a blocked or degraded UDP media path. Teams keeps the call alive by falling back to TCP 443, so the call connects, but latency and jitter rise. Availability checks and URL tests usually miss this, which is why EMS 8.7 tests the media path and QoS directly.

How can I tell if a Teams outage is Microsoft or my network?

Run the same tests from more than one vantage point. If ENow's cloud test locations and every office fail, the problem is likely on Microsoft's side. If only one office fails, it's local. EMS 8.7 also watches Microsoft's published Teams IPs and URLs so you can spot firewall allowlist drift.

What are synthetic transactions in Teams monitoring?

Synthetic transactions are scheduled tests that act like a user. In ENow EMS 8.7 they create and retrieve a Teams meeting through Microsoft Graph and run user search and calendar checks. Each stage is timed, so a failure points to the layer that broke.

Does ENow EMS still use Exchange Web Services (EWS)?

EMS 8.7 retires the EWS logon test and moves EWS-based checks to Microsoft Graph. Microsoft blocks EWS by default in Exchange Online starting October 1, 2026, and removes it completely after April 2027.

Can ENow EMS report on Teams guests and owners?

Yes. The Teams Members and Owners report shows User Type by default and resolves guest display names, so you can see which external guests hold owner roles and keep a point-in-time record for access reviews.