Can You Install an SDN Listener in a SfB CCE Environment?

As part of my job at Nectar Corp, I'm always looking at ways to get call detail information from various Microsoft-based UC telephony components. It's easy to get a wealth of detail from an on-prem deployment of Skype for Business, using either direct access to the SfB monitoring databases (for historical info) or via the Skype for Business SDN dialog listeners (for realtime call data).  As mentioned in my recent blog post, the same cannot be said for Office 365 UC workloads such as SfB Online and Teams.

Nectar has a tool that relies on knowing when a call starts and stops in realtime so we can gather information from various network components as the call is happening. Nectar uses the SfB SDN interface for this realtime info. Since both SfBO and Teams lack ANY sort of call data API, we have to resort to other methods to learn about realtime calls.

A Nectar customer has deployed several Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition (CCE) instances to provide on-prem PSTN call routing for SfB Online users. CCE is the precursor of Teams Direct Routing, and it does essentially the same thing but in a WAAAAAAY more complex manner. It consists of several pre-packaged VMs running a vastly slimmed down Skype for Business environment.

We were in discussions with the customer to see if there was any way we could get realtime call info from the CCE instances, by installing the Microsoft SDN Dialog Listener on any of the CCE VMs. Nobody seemed to know for certain, so I elected to setup a CCE instance of my own to run some tests. The question I was trying to answer was:

Can you get call data out of a CCE instance using the MS SDN Listener service??? 

TL;DR:  No.

I had built myself a fancy new work PC at home that I figured would be ideal for this test. I put in 32GB of RAM so I could spin up VMs as needed for my tests, and this would be an excellent test OR SO I THOUGHT!

My first hurdle was that I needed a virtual machine host that would host the VMs required for CCE. In other words, I needed to run VMs from within a VM.

Just like the movie, except much more boring.

CCE only supports Windows 2012 R2 as the VM host OS, so I started with that as my VM host for my VMs, but it blocked me from installing the Hyper-V components, since it was already a VM. A bit of research showed that I could use Windows Server 2019, which had no such limitation. I spun up my Hyper-V host VM, gave it 24 GB of RAM, all the processor cores I had, and off I went.

...OR SO I THOUGHT (AGAIN). I ran into issues right off the bat when installing the CCE components, where most of the CCE PowerShell commands were available. Thanks to a workaround from Shawn Harry, I was soon off to the races and installing CCE.

...BUT NO! FOILED AGAIN!!! There are a number of steps to deploy a CCE instance, most of which require running various CCE PowerShell commands. One of these commands performed a hardware check to make sure the Hyper-V host had enough resources to run the required VMs. I was rudely informed that my super-awesome, brand-new workstation PC did not have enough memory, processor cores or disk space to run CCE.

Keanu is sad, and so am I

Time to implement my hacker skilz.

The big red, failure message that PowerShell spit out at me helpfully included the path to the script that did the hardware check:

C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\CloudConnector\Internal\MtCommon.ps1

A quick review of that script, and a few edits to the $logicalProcessorsCount, TotalPhysicalMemory, FreePhysicalMemory, and FreeDiskSize variables and the script was convinced that I had a super-server with 999999999999 MB of memory, diskspace and processor cores.

With a few more tweaks here and there, I was finally able to get a full Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition instance running in my modest home lab. Since the CCE environment consists of several standard Windows VMs, I was able to login to them and attempt to install the SDN Listener on what I hoped would be possible candidates: the CMS or the Mediation VM.

Neither of those were running as a full front-end server, but I still held out hope. The CMS VM was running the Centralized Logging Service Agent, File Transfer Agent and Master/Replica Replicator Agents. The Mediation VM was running the Centralized Logging Service Agent, Mediation service and Replica Replicator Agents.

I attempted to install the SDN Listener on both those VMs and got the following message:

And there you go. The answer to a question that nobody else was looking for. No, you can't run SDN on any CCE VM role.

Hope you're happy @ucomsgeek.

The Current State of Microsoft Cloud-Based Call Analytics

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and nearly every company who currently runs on-prem Microsoft Skype for Business deployments are investigating the feasibility of moving their UC infrastructure to the cloud.

While moving UC workloads to the cloud eliminates the need for most (if not all) customer-owned server hardware, UC media still must traverse the customer network. Since the network is one of the major causes of poor call quality, customers still require advanced troubleshooting capabilities.

Microsoft does provide some basic call analytics in Office 365, but there is much room for improvement. As such, many 3^rd party vendors (including Nectar, the company I work for) are keen to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion and misdirection in the marketplace about what is possible with 3^rd party call analytics in Office 365 UC platforms.

Skype for Business Online

Even though Skype for Business Online is being deprecated in favour of Microsoft Teams, there are still many customers who have not made the transition. As mentioned previously, Microsoft does provide some limited call analytics and reporting capabilities for both SfBO and Teams at no extra cost, but the available tools only show a subset of the available information, presented in limited ways. A dedicated person can customize the tools to meet some of their needs, but this takes time, effort and deep knowledge.

This is the ideal place for other companies to provide additional value. Unfortunately, the only way to access detailed call analytics is to use the Get-CsUserSession PowerShell command (included as part of the Skype forBusiness Online PS Module).

The output of the Get-CsUserSession command provides detailed CDR and quality information for a specified user over a specified timeframe in JSON format. Much of the detail is not available in the existing O365 dashboards. At first blush, this appears to be a fantastic way to import detailed call data into 3^rd party call analytics platforms, but there are some significant limitations:

• The Get-CsUserSession command only returns data for a single user
• No built-in delta mechanism, so no way to return only new/updated information since the last time the command was run
• Data is only available for 30 days

Theoretically, a tool could constantly run the Get-CsUserSession command for every user in the enterprise, but this is not an approach that scales to the enterprise-level.  Nectar looked at this but discarded it after early tests showed inherent scalability issues.

Another approach would be to provide a GUI front-end that simply runs the Get-CsUserSession in the background on demand for a specified user. This avoids any scalability issues and can provide some useful information on a given user’s call quality. However, this approach doesn’t allow for any enterprise-level reporting or trending data, since data for all users is never downloaded.

Microsoft Teams

As mentioned in the previous section, customers have access to a limited portfolio of Teams call analytics tools through their Office 365 subscription. There is room for improvement and vendors are anxious to show value in this area.

At the time of writing, there is absolutely no way to access detailed call analytics about Microsoft Teams calls or conferences. The Get-CsUserSession command discussed in the previous section only returns call data for SfBO calls.  Some Teams PSTN calls may show up in Get-CsUserSession results, but that’s because it appears PSTN calls are routed through SfBO infrastructure. Detailed call data on P2P calls or conferences are not available.

Some vendors provide some great analytics about Teams usage (channel members, activity etc). These analytics are provided through the Office365 Graph API and does not provide any detailed call analytics. Through misunderstanding or miscommunication, some customers end up confusing this point and think they can get the same level of call quality troubleshooting as they currently can from on-prem Skype for Business deployments.

The Future of Microsoft’s Cloud-Based Analytics

Microsoft has not shared any information about when or if they will release an API that will allow vendors to incorporate Teams call data into their existing call analytics platforms. Rest assured that Nectar is keeping a close eye on the situation and will be able to incorporate Office365 call analytics into our call analytics platform as soon as something is available.

In the meantime, if a vendor is promising they can do advanced analytics for Microsoft’s cloud platform, think of this and ask the right questions:

• Exactly what kind of call data can the tool retrieve? (MOS scores, jitter, packet loss etc)
• How does the tool get data from Office365?
• Does the tool provide detailed call quality reports for the entire enterprise?

If you get appropriate answers, then you can make a more informed decision on purchasing a call analytics platform for your cloud-based UC platforms.

This article was also posted on Nectar's website and Telecom Reseller