Plan, Develop, Scale, Fix, Repeat...
Do you know who should be looking at your calls’ data?
In my last article “Your product sucks; why can't I see other people's cameras?” I wrote about how the pandemic created the perfect storm and exposed the weaknesses of all IP based communication products out there. Hopefully, the rationale given raises awareness and created the sense of urgency this matter deserves.
For how long are organizations’ tech teams keep going around in circles with no visibility to what their products are doing and where?
So you agree with me on the necessity for a monitoring solution, but does your organisation knows who should look into what? That is as important as having the solution. A comprehensive monitoring solution can quickly overwhelm any user if you don’t even know what data you need to be looking at.
To help organizations understand their needs better in this space, we could simplify things by aggregating the most typical users of an RTC monitoring system and advise what should be their concerns. Of course, this is subject to interpretation and you could most probably fit more roles in the list below but it is a starting point:
The Developer 🧑💻
The one who builds and adds new features to the system and needs to understand on the fly if/how that feature impacts usability or quality of the service delivery. In essence, the developer needs to understand if, after any add-on or change, the product, the system, or the new feature itself works correctly. Because of such, this is usually the element of the product organization that needs the most granular knowledge it can get and the element more focused on specific parts of the system.
The Product Manager 👩💼
While Developers are responsible for more granular pieces of the product, the Product Manager has a broader vision of the product and the system that the product is part of. It is naturally more exposed to the infrastructure that hosts the product and often responsible for its scalability. For that, the Product Manager is probably very interested in knowing not only which features are working, but also how the user experience relates with the geographic spread of the product, or even how outer conditions could affect that user experience - ISP, network type, the device used, etc. In essence, the Product Manager is looking to mitigate the impact that certain combinations on the user environment could have on the product.
The Customer Support Team 🧑🔧
The Support and Operations team is the first line of support for triage tickets and customer complaints. As mentioned earlier, without the right tools any troubleshooting exercise suddenly becomes a blaming and presuming game. Because of this, the Support and Operations team will be looking to get not only real-time information about running calls but also comprehensive dashboards with meaningful data that assists them to react proactively instead of being reactive to new support requests.
Knowing who would be using a monitoring platform and for what, can help you understand what specific features and aspects need to be exposed per different user, and also, what to measure and evaluate once you have a tool in front of you.
In my next article, I’ll be writing a bit more about specific monitoring features and tools your team needs.
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This article is part of the series: "Why do you need a monitoring solution today."
Stay Tuned for more... 📻
