Introducing Call Insights

A video call is only as strong as its weakest link. For smooth, engaging communication to occur, each participant must enjoy a flawless experience. Participants bring diverse devices, networks, locations into the mix - introducing variability in conditions. However, with diverse devices, networks, and locations involved, its introduces variability in conditions. A mobile user might endure constant buffering while a desktop stream remains smooth. Or one peer's video turns pixelated while others maintain crisp HD quality.

Imagine trying to troubleshoot such an issue. When video call quality degrades, pinpointing the cause can be a daunting task due to the complexity of the different environments involved. We've all been there – sifting through dense, time-intensive video logs, trying to make sense of the jumble of data.

But what if there were a way to cut through the noise and gain meaningful insights into the root causes of such issues? A way to transform those complex logs into a readable, user-friendly format that highlights the progression of each peer's call experience?

Introducing Call Insights

At 100ms, we believe in abstracting complexities. Following this principle, we wanted to help developers debug video call sessions and turn complicated logs into meaningful information. We're excited to introduce Peer and Session Insights on the 100ms dashboard. This tool provides a quick way to understand and troubleshoot a session and each participant's experience. Complex logs are converted into easy-to-read events with timestamps, showing what happened during each participant's call. Now, both developers and PMs can diagnose issues, identify problems, and strategically improve call quality based on information reported by participants. In this article, we will go through key parts of this tool that can be used to troubleshoot or simply review how a session went for its users. We'll also look into debugging a specific participant's session experience. So, read along!

How did the session go?

Delivering an exceptional video call experience is key. The 100ms dashboard provides powerful Session Insights tools to review session details in an easy format. Simply go to Sessions, select a session ID, and access comprehensive summaries of what happened during the call. Let's briefly review these:

1. Session Timeline - The Session Timeline provides a chronological view of events across all peers in a session. You can find a specific session by entering the session ID in the 100ms dashboard > Sessions section. The timeline includes:
   1. Peer Events - Key events that occurred across peers during the session, such as join, leave or hand raises.
   2. Recording Events (if enabled) - Events when recording started, stopped, and ended for the particular session.
   3. Livestreaming Events (if enabled) - Events when livestreaming started and stopped.
   4. Error Events - Any session-related errors, such as recording failures or livestream failures, are captured here.
2. Session Health - This section provides an overall Connection Quality Score or CQS for all peers who joined the particular session. The score is calculated across all peers based on metrics like packet loss, jitter, and bandwidth, quantifying the impact of network conditions.
3. Issue Affected Peers and their Breakdown - This section summarizes the total number of peers affected of all peers in that session. However, knowing that it was a problematic session is not good enough. number of peers affected by various issues, followed by a breakdown of the peers aggregated by issue type. This information helps identify and troubleshoot any problems that may have occurred during the session. This section also summarizes how many participants experienced each type of issue. This breakdown makes it easier to see which issues were most common and analyze the affected participants.

Going a level deeper with Peer Insights

1. Peer Details - Get context on each peer’s environment with details like their name, user ID, session information, browser, device, and SDK version.

2. Event Log - Access a chronological record of all events experienced by the peer, including audio/video muting, device switching, and error occurrences. This visibility into their journey helps pinpoint potential issues.

3. Experience Issues - Identify and troubleshoot session-related problems like join failures, disconnections, publishing errors, and subscription failures.

4. Connection Quality Score - Gain insights into the peer's network performance trend throughout the call. The score is updated at 15-second intervals using the latest data points captured, offering a comprehensive view of the session's health.

   

5. Network Performance: Track underlying network conditions that affect media quality, such as bitrate, frame rate, packet loss, round-trip time, jitter, and CPU/network limitations. Understand how these factors influence the peer's experience. Read how Publisher(outgoing) and Subscriber(incoming) media quality is impacted by network factors.

6. Quality Summaries: Go beyond the connection quality score with detailed summaries of the peer's publisher and subscriber network quality, including the duration of any issues faced.

Let's debug a peer

Let’s take an example of a session where a peer faced audio/video issues during a session and debug it on 100ms Dashboard. The peer reported audio choppiness and not being able to view others video.

Participants a.k.a peers in a 100ms session are identified using a unique peer_id for a unique session. On 100ms dashboard, you can view all peers who participated in a given session. You can also filter peers using your user ID that you pass to 100ms.

Follow these steps to view Peer details and insights

1. Sign-up or Log in to 100ms Dashboard.

   For existing sessions, go to Sessions; specify or filter sessions using a session ID

2. Select a peer using Peer Id or Peer name

3. Click on Peer ID and move to peer details page

Steps to debug issues faced by a peer

1. Peer Information -
2. Event Log -
3. Experience Issues - No Issues reported indicates that this peer encountered no significant experience issues.
4. Connection Quality Score - Average CQS: 3.73 - An average score of 3.73 suggests a fair to good connection quality indicating certain blips during the session. the graphs shows that the peer started facing issues from 20:39 to 20:44:21 impacting connection quality for about for 4 mins 30 seconds in total. Quality Issues: 2 Issues
   1. Publisher Network Issues: 4 minutes 30 seconds in total
      1. Bitrate
      2. FPS is impacted
      3. RTT
      4. Jitter
      5. Quality was limited - reason for publisher network issues
   2. Subscriber Network Issues: 4 minutes 30 seconds in total
      1. incoming bitrate - expected bitrate was more than actual bitrate received
      2. incoming packet loss - lost incoming video from remote peers

Next On Call Insights

We’ve only just begun unlocking video call insights. While peer-level insights simplifies debugging the lowest level peer and session level diagnostics, there’s a lot more coming soon to Call Insights:

• Aggregated Insights Across All Sessions
  • Pinpoint high-quality sessions versus those with quality challenges.
  • Track key usage metrics and trends across all your video sessions.
  • Identify macro-level patterns in devices, browsers, and networks causing widespread issues among peers.

Start debugging sessions and participants today and unlock a new level of visibility into your video call infrastructure. Read more on Peer Insights docs. Stay tuned as the Call Insights journey continues! 👋🏻