Best Practice Configurations Dashboard for Microsoft Teams Meetings

We’ve all seen network issues disrupt a Teams meeting, right? Like when a user’s video suddenly freezes or their audio starts breaking up, and admins are left wondering what went wrong behind the scenes. 😬 Figuring out what’s causing those glitches isn’t always easy.

Microsoft Teams admins often have to juggle between tools like Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and call analytics to investigate issues. Also, admins have to identify systematic issues and review network configurations across multiple portals. And even after all that, the root cause remains unclear. 😓

Fortunately, the best practice configuration dashboard in Teams admin center, brings all such key diagnostic insights into one place. It helps identify deviations from Microsoft’s recommended best practices for Teams meetings and guides you with the right remediation steps. 📈 All monitored areas are evaluated over a rolling seven-day period, giving you up-to-date visibility into your Teams meeting environment.

Better yet, Microsoft is currently rolling out three new best practices, adding more depth to the dashboard’s insights.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to streamline Teams meeting call quality using the Teams best practice configurations dashboard.

The best practice configurations dashboard for Microsoft Teams meetings, highlights six essential best practice configurations that help ensure reliable Teams collaboration. It identifies locations or environments that do not follow Microsoft’s recommended best practices, which is especially important when managing large Teams environments.

1. Enable the correct ports and protocols
2. Implement split tunnelling for VPNs
3. Update outdated client versions
4. Address DNS resolution failures (new)
5. Bypass cloud proxy (new)
6. Bypass local proxy (new)

Tip: In addition to these, add verification checks for Teams meetings to extend secure collaboration.

These best practices address the most common Teams meeting issues while providing the secure configuration for Microsoft Teams and optimal performance. By applying them, you can optimize how Teams media traffic is routed and ensure users are connected with reliable audio and video performance. This results in fewer Teams meeting issues and reduces the need for deep dives into CQD and analytics.

Note: The best practice configurations dashboard is limited to Microsoft Teams meetings and does not include webinars or town halls.

You can access the best practice configurations dashboard in the Teams admin center by following these steps:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft Teams admin center.
2. In the left-hand menu, go to Meetings.
3. Under that, select Best practice configurations.

Once you open the dashboard, you’ll see a quick summary of your organization’s Teams meeting health. It shows what’s working well and what needs your attention, based on Microsoft’s recommendation practices.

As an admin, you can easily spot common issues that might affect meeting quality like network settings, outdated clients, or proxy configurations. This all-in-one summary not only helps you deliver a high-quality high quality and secured Teams meeting experience.

Let’s now explore each configuration in detail and understand how they work together to deliver a smoother, reliable Teams meeting environment.

To view in-depth metrics and recommendations, simply select one of the best practice configurations in Microsoft Teams admin center.

The Enable the correct ports and protocols dashboard helps identify Teams media Teams media communications conducted over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) instead of User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Since TCP is not ideal for real-time audio and video, relying on it can lead to poor meeting quality and a bad user experience.

To avoid call and meeting quality issues, UDP ports must be open on both network and client firewalls for Microsoft Teams services.

With these insights, admins can quickly detect and fix network misconfigurations, ensuring users connect with the right protocols for a reliable Teams meeting experience.

Key insights available in this dashboard include:

1. Network traffic trends – Displays cities and regions with high volumes of TCP and UDP based Teams media traffic.
2. Recommended actions – Lists steps to fix misconfigurations. The primary fix is ensuring UDP ports are open on both network and client firewalls.
3. Regions with TCP usage – Visual maps highlight locations where Teams calls are falling back to TCP.
4. Along with this, the dashboard also provides a tabular data for deeper analysis:
   • Cities – Lists impacted cities where TCP is used for Teams media streams.
   • Public IPs (reflexive) – Shows external IP addresses with a high proportion of TCP traffic.
   • Volume of TCP streams – Count of Teams calls and meetings using TCP.
   • Volume of UDP streams – Count of Teams calls and meetings using UDP.
   • Total Streams – Combined count of media sessions that used either TCP or UDP protocols.
   • Percent of TCP – Percentage of media traffic relying on TCP.
   • Status – Indicates if admin action is needed or not based on Microsoft’s recommendations.
5. Admins can also filter the data by city, IP, or status, toggle map views, customize table columns, and export the data as CSV for further analysis.

By proactively resolving these misconfigurations, admins can significantly improve Teams meeting quality and reduce helpdesk incidents related to connectivity.

The Implement split tunnelling for VPNs dashboard highlights when Teams traffic is unnecessarily routed through VPNs using forced tunnelling, which can degrade Teams meeting performance.

Forced tunnelling is a common approach where all user traffic, including Microsoft Teams media, all routed through the common corporate network.

To avoid this, Microsoft recommends split tunnelling for VPNs. It allows Teams traffic to bypass the VPN and connect directly to Microsoft 365. This approach reduces latency in media communications and improves a remote user’s media quality.

The dashboard provides the following insights:

1. VPN traffic trend – Shows the number of cities with VPN usage and their streaming types.
2. Recommended actions – Suggests to enable split tunneling for VPNS for reliable Teams connectivity.
3. Regions with VPN streams – Visual map highlighting areas with high VPN stream usage.
4. Along with this, the dashboard also provides a tabular data for deeper analysis:
   • Cities – Lists impacted regions and cities.
   • Public IPs (reflexive) – Counts and lists public IPs with a high proportion of VPN traffic.
   • Internet service provider – Displays the ISP for the stream.
   • VPN streams – Number of Teams streams routed through VPN.
   • All other streams – Number of streams not routed through VPN.
   • Total Streams – Combined count of VPN and non-VPN streams.
   • Percent of VPN streams – Percentage of traffic using VPN.
   • Status – Indicates whether admin action is required based on Microsoft’s guidance.
5. Additionally, admins can apply filters, customize columns, toggle to map, export data to CSV for detailed analysis and manage settings.

While VPNs improve security, routing Teams traffic through them can slow down meetings. Enabling direct connection secure access to internal systems while optimizing performance for Microsoft Teams.

The Update outdated client versions dashboard helps admins detect outdated Teams desktop clients on Windows and Mac across the organization. It also highlights locations most impacted by outdated clients, which can lead to poor meeting quality, feature issues, and security risks.

The dashboard tracks media streams from devices using builds over three months old, helping admins pinpoint where updates are urgently needed. It provides usage trends, identifies regions with high outdated usage, and recommends actions to encourage timely upgrades.

Keeping Teams clients up to date ensures a smoother, more secure, and consistent meeting experience for all users.

The key features of the dashboard include:

1. Client versions trend – Shows outdated Teams client by date and location.
2. Recommended action – Encourage users to keep their new Teams desktop client updated for enhanced performance, security, and access to the latest features.
3. Regions with outdated clients – Visual map highlighting areas with high usage of older Teams versions.
4. In addition to this, the table provides the following data:
   • Cities – Lists cities where outdated Teams versions are in use.
   • Public IPs (reflexive)– Public IPs associated with older Teams clients.
   • Users on outdated clients– Number of users running outdated Teams versions in a region.
   • Total users – Total number of Teams users in that region.
   • Percent of users on outdated clients – Percentage of users using outdated builds.
   • Volume on streams on outdated clients – Number of Teams calls and meetings generated from outdated clients.
   • Total streams – Combined count of all Teams media streams from both updated and outdated clients.
   • Percent of streams on outdated clients – Percentage of Teams media traffic from outdated versions.
   • Status – Indicates if admin action is required based on Microsoft’s client version recommendations.
5. As like other sections, admins can filter, customize columns, toggle between map and table views, export results to CSV and manage settings for deeper analysis.

Ensuring timely updates reduce helpdesk issues, unlock the latest features, and enhance your organization’s security. With advanced Teams meeting capabilities, you can enable premium features like end-to-end encryption for sensitive meetings.

So far, we’ve explored three core configuration that directly impact Teams meeting quality: optimizing network ports and protocols, implementing VPN split tunnelling, and updating outdated client versions.

Note: In July 2025, three additional features were introduced in the best practice configuration dashboard, further expanding the toolkit for IT admins. These include:

Helps identify and fix DNS resolution failures that can prevent Teams from connecting properly or cause call issues.

Ensures Teams traffic avoids unnecessary cloud proxy routing, enabling faster and more reliable media performance.

Detects and addresses locations where Microsoft Teams traffic is routed through a local proxy, preventing performance slowdowns.

Once the new best practices are rolled out, the respective sections will be updated in detail to help IT admins further strengthen the performance of their Teams meeting.

The best practice configuration dashboard is not just a troubleshooting tool. It serves as a proactive guide to ensure secured connectivity to Microsoft Teams meetings, enhance user experience, and boost overall meeting performance. Stay tuned for more updates as new capabilities are added.