If you’re responsible for managing Microsoft Teams for your organization, whether you're a small business with 200 users or an enterprise with 30,000, you already know that reliable, high-quality collaboration experiences are essential. But as Microsoft makes changes to the Teams platform and Teams Admin Center (TAC), it can be hard for admins to keep up.
One recent change that left me scratching my head is the change in how data for Large Meetings and Webinars is surfaced. Let’s talk about what’s changed, why it matters, and what you should consider doing about it.
Until recently, Microsoft Teams admins had a relatively streamlined process for reviewing the performance and participation data from large meetings and webinars. From the Admin Center dashboard, a few clicks (four to be precise) would take you to the Recent Meetings section, where you could easily export detailed information about participants and their call experience.
Here’s a breakdown of what was available before:
Legacy CSV Export Columns:
This data helped administrators understand not only who joined a meeting but also how well their experience went, including network details, packet loss, IP address, and other metrics crucial for troubleshooting performance issues.
Now, following the same click path in the Admin Center (and some extra scrolling), the exported data has been streamlined, arguably too much:
New CSV Export Columns:
While you still get a list of participants and a general sense of call quality, much of the detail that admins relied on for performance analysis, issue triage, and capacity planning is missing. It’s a major pivot—one that feels like Microsoft is nudging admins toward Teams Premium licensing for deeper insights, but even that won’t fully restore the capabilities lost.
For IT admins managing large Teams meetings, such as webinars and Town Halls, missing data means blind spots.
You might receive a ticket (or, more likely, an angry call or ping) from a VIP user, say, a C-level executive, who experienced poor call quality during a 1,000-person town hall. With the old data set, you could more quickly investigate their session: Was it network latency? An outdated device? Wi-Fi issues?
With the new export, you might only see that they attended and that their audio quality was classified as "good," even if they rated it as poor.
This is not just a minor inconvenience. It erodes confidence in IT's ability to:
Quickly pinpoint root causes
Validate user complaints
Take proactive steps to improve future meeting quality
Using a third-party solution like ENow’s Microsoft Teams Monitoring and Reporting, I can drill into Large Meeting Performance Dashboards that surface more granular data. For example, I can see a "Poor Call Quality Count" for a meeting and then click into a Microsoft Teams Poor Meeting Snapshot report.
Figure 1: ENow Microsoft Teams Monitoring and Reporting - Microsoft Teams Poor Meeting Snapshot
This provides metrics like:
In one example, the report showed that the user flagged the meeting as poor via the post-call survey, despite backend metrics indicating otherwise. This level of insight is invaluable for admins who need to respond with more than “Everything looks fine on our end.”
Microsoft Teams is a mission-critical platform, and organizations can’t afford to rely on guesswork. Third-party Microsoft Teams monitoring tools fill in the gaps left by built-in Microsoft tooling and offer:
Especially for large or high-profile meetings, identifying call degradations, dropped participants, or connection issues is essential. With ENow, you can view call paths, proxy interference, device versions, and more, none of which is available in the updated Microsoft TAC exports.
Microsoft's administrative tools can sometimes present a "surface-level" view initially, with more detailed options and deeper functionality accessible through further exploration or specific actions. Third-party solutions enable you to set alerts, generate trend-based performance analytics, and help identify patterns to address before users encounter recurring issues.
You can proactively monitor the Teams experience for your executive team or other VIPs, ensuring their meetings are supported with white-glove IT treatment.
Better data means better decisions. Whether it’s scaling your infrastructure, guiding user training, or planning a Teams Premium rollout, having accurate historical data is key.
Most admins don’t just manage Teams, they’re juggling SharePoint, Exchange Online, and OneDrive too. ENow consolidates this into a single pane of glass, reducing tool fatigue and improving IT efficiency.
Microsoft’s shift away from detailed call logs and participant-level telemetry is part of a broader trend we’ve seen more recently: pushing richer data behind premium paywalls or limiting it altogether.
While Teams Premium does introduce features like custom branding, intelligent recap, and advanced meeting protection, it still doesn’t replace what admins had when troubleshooting technical issues in real-time.
Even if you’re investing in Teams Premium, you may still want a tool to access call-level diagnostic data, historical insights, and correlated event logs that Microsoft no longer exposes easily.
Microsoft Teams remains a powerful platform, but as it grows, so does the complexities of managing it. The recent changes to Large Meeting statistics in the Admin Center are a clear signal that admins need to evaluate new approaches and tools if they want to maintain visibility, ensure uptime, and deliver excellent collaboration experiences.
If you’re a Teams admin, ask yourself:
If the answer to any of those is “not really,” then now’s the time to start looking beyond the Teams Admin Center.
Don’t let Microsoft’s limited exports slow you down. With ENow’s Microsoft Teams Large Meeting Performance Dashboard, you’ll gain instant visibility into:
👉 Request a demo or start your free trial and see how ENow helps you monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Microsoft Teams—without compromise.