You may not know but Microsoft is providing a fairly nice tool to check your network for SfB performance. Free. Free is a very good price, eh?
I am not going to extol the virtues and services offered by fastrack.microsoft.com, I just want to delve a little into the network checking tool. And, this tool has been around for a bit. So, I wanted to get a little updated review.
First off, I cannot even find this thing anywhere on the https://fasttrack.microsoft.com site. Sorry. Maybe I am blind, but I am not seeing it anywhere. There is probably some zippy button marked “tools” but I am just not groking. Having said that, I know of
http://ap1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/o365nwtest
http://em1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/o365nwtest
http://na1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/o365nwtest
Here I am checking my lab tenant against the ap1 site.
Note the two addresses given by the tool…
The 76 address is my laptop, currently operating from a hotel out in the middle of the Oregon Cascade mountain range. So, this connection is going to be testing from my laptop to the AP1 site to see how things stack up.
With a little imagination, you could bury a workstation in some remote spot on your network, and pretty much map out the entire path to the world – giving a glimpse into how things line up. This could be useful, yes?
You can see that the lag from here to there is running about 170 ms, which might be so great in some circumstances.
Overall, the tool produces a raft of great info… here is the summary tab. Note that something is not quite right as the tool cannot simulate VOIP traffic. Could be something you need to look into here?
Here is the same test run against the NA1 site. Note the differences. We also now have a MOS score. 3.2 is not as good as we want, but doable. Not too bad for out of a hotel where I am sharing bandwidth with 200 other rooms.
We also got some nice jitter measurements on this run…
And finally, if you drive into the route tab, you will get more data points.
What do you think you could do with information such as this?
If you have questions about any attribute/factor measured in these tests, there is also a handy glossary.
If you or your organization is considering moving to Office 365 in any capacity, this is one of the first tools you should be working. I have been telling customers for a long time that if we do our job right, then any problems will be network, firewall, or load balancers. This tool can help you prove that. In a more complex internal net, you might even be able to tell the network team right where to look!
YMMV
