Modality Score

Planned Release October 2021
Early customers welcome, please see the following note 

October Early

*Early release are subject to change, alterations and revoke at any period and under full discretion by Modality, may contain issues or bugs. This may differentiate to actual release and release notes provided.

Why have a Modality Stream Score?

Teams calls and Meetings are made up of multiple media streams, if a media stream is disrupted by the network (Packet loss, jitter, latency*) the user experience will be impacted.

Microsoft Call Records API does NOT provide a single data property or value for the classification of Quality.

Modality Stream score allow for the classification of Quality across Microsoft threshold values for packet loss, Jitter and Round Trip*
This classification allows the data to categorized into Good, Impacted and Poor as well as the data to be filtered by each.

Modality Stream score uses a formula to score each stream Out of 10 based on packet loss, Jitter and Round Trip.

Modality Stream score is a tool to allow you to easily find poor or impacted network streams without needing to know what is a good or bad level of Packet loss, Jitter or Round Trip.

Modality Stream score allows you to understand the Proportion of good, impacted, and poor streams by for example Region, Country, Department or Building, Subnet or User - its provided through out all reports from October Release onwards**

What do Modality Score?

Modality Stream Score:

Modality Score Each Audio Stream, based on Packet Loss, Jitter and RTT – This is called the Modality Stream Score – It’s a formula to score a SINGLE Network Stream

Each Stream is given a score out of 10, which places it into a category of Good, Impacted or Poor

Modality Network Score:

Customers want to know how a “site” or “Network(s)” are performing, to do this we Score the “Network”, This is the Modality Network Score

Network = a collection of 2 or more streams

The network score takes each streams single score, and runs it through a scoring formula that gives the “Network” a score out of 10. Poor and Impacted have more weight to pull the score down.

Why have a Modality Network Stream Score?

A Modality Stream score without the context of the network Stream score e.g as below can easily be misinterpreted as no issues.
This score lets you easily understand which individually or combined are the effecting network factor to the overall score.

Modality Stream Score, how we score each stream individually:

Each Network Performance Metric has it’s own range of “good”, “impacted” and “poor”

Good means the user should perceive no issues because of the network

Impacted is a very deliberate term, as some customers may deem the higher scores in impacted acceptable for their network, others will not

Poor aligns to Microsoft’s thresholds (Modality believe these are quite high, hence the impacted category)

How Modality Stream Score works:

We take the Average and Max for each of the network metrics and calculate a new value that is 99% weighted to the average, 1% weighed to the max, this is the value we Score/categorize

PacketLossMetricWeScore = (PL_Average * 0.99) + (PL_Max X 0.01)

We score the Packet Loss, Jitter and RTT according to the formula and thresholds above, each get a score out of 10

The Modality Stream Score for the stream
So a stream has 4 scores, Packet Loss, Jitter, RTT and Modality Stream Score
Edge Case: if a stream is missing Packet Loss values, we don’t score it, but if it’s missing Jitter or RTT we still score – logic is Packet Loss is most important

How we score a network:

If a stream is Good it has a weight of 1 on the overall network score

If a stream is Impacted it has a impact of x1.5 on the overall network score

If a stream is Poor it has an impact of x3 on the overall score

This means networks with more poor and impacted streams score worse out of 10, even if a lot of the streams are good. 

This formula does not impact the number of streams in each category or the score of any individual stream

Using a mean of the scores often “hides” impacted and poor because there are often mostly Good streams

The “weighted” Network score gives a wider range of scores out of 10

The Ratio of good to impacted to poor influences the network score

What the Modality Score is NOT:

It is not a score of device or endpoint performance

It is not a score of End Point performance

It is not a qualitative indication of end user experience

It does not score sessions that fail to establish – see failure reports.

It is not a single silver bullet to score all performance; other reports should be used to understand overall performance/user experience

Network Exceeds/Bursts

Infrastructure e.g driver / device / patching

It is:

It is a mathematical calculation of network performance on a single media stream from A to B

A way to classify and categorize Streams into Good, Impacted and Poor

An easy identifier to help troubleshoot and focus efforts

Where is the Modality Score within the reports?

The following ribbon is provided throughout majority of reports, within visuals and tables

Examples