What’s Your Zoom Performance?

By Heidi Gabrielson
29-May-2020

Remote workforce productivity is critical to successful business continuity. Is the performance of your collaboration tools, such as Zoom, keeping pace?

Collaboration applications have evolved over the past few months from being a nice-to-have tool to become the go-to means for connection and communication between remote teams. Organizations across the globe are using video collaboration apps, like Zoom, for a wide variety of interactivity – including everything from video chats and one-on-ones to team meetings, webinars, and even virtual conferences.

We've all been in Zoom meetings where you could barely understand someone. Wouldn't you like to know if you could fix it? — We’ve all been in Zoom meetings where you could barely understand someone. Wouldn’t you like to know if you could fix it?

As a result, it should come as no surprise that Zoom usage has exploded from 10 million daily users in December 2019 to more than 300 million daily participants (paid and free) in April 2020.¹

With 74% of companies planning to permanently shift to more remote work post COVID², it means collaboration apps like Zoom are here to stay.

Zoom is a cloud platform that combines video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across mobile and fixed environments. Like traditional VoIP applications, Zoom performance is highly sensitive to network latency, and despite using modern compression algorithms, it consumes massive bandwidth when compared to most apps.

Zoom performance is critical to the success of virtual teams

Consistently providing a high-quality end-user experience is critical to the success of virtual teams and is core to driving the productivity enterprises need now more than ever. Here are several must-do’s to maximize your Zoom performance:

Understand how Zoom is being used and how much bandwidth it is consuming on your Internet links. You do not want to over subscribe your Zoom links. At the same time, if you limit Zoom’s bandwidth, your users will likely experience jitter, which causes choppy audio and blotchy, pixelated video. You’ll want full-stack real-time and historical analysis that gives you visibility into the H.323 and SIP protocols that Zoom uses.
Monitor quality of service (QOS) and ensure your Zoom traffic is appropriately classified so that it receives appropriate bandwidth and prioritization. Flow monitoring gives you visibility into all your DSCP markings and is your choice for QoS analysis.
Monitor and understand the network performance for interrelated components like the session border controller, the routers handling the video traffic, and the external connection to the Zoom cloud service. Make sure they don’t get overwhelmed. Infrastructure management can help here by monitoring the availability of devices and interfaces.

How can you be sure? Well, we’re already helping many of our existing customers with their on-prem and VPN-based Zoom performance, including a global financial services firm. We’re helping them work through these exact steps to ensure their Zoom environment is optimized for end-user experience and productivity while also managing its impact on their broader network. We accomplished this using a collection of flows and packets, which provides integrated and seamless monitoring and troubleshooting.

¹ https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/

² https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3982949/covid-19-bulletin-executive-pulse-3-april-2020