Announcing Call Insights for Plivo’s Voice API Platform
- 04 Dec 2019
Voice call quality may be impacted by many factors, and troubleshooting voice call issues requires technical expertise. It can be a time-consuming task, given that voice calls from an API platform often involve multiple call legs and precise orchestration of the call flow with the help of REST APIs, XML, and API callbacks.
Plivo’s new Call Insights service provides detailed statistics, actionable insights, and powerful analytics for voice calls from the Plivo Voice API platform.
Call Debug UI
In this release, we’re introducing a new Call Debug UI with a host of features to help you troubleshoot call setup and call quality issues.
Call state change timeline: The UI displays call initiation time, ring time, answer time, and end time information for every call, along with other basic details such as call type (VoIP or carrier), direction, and billing info.
Suspected issues and Plivo quality score: The panel shows a list of call quality issues suspected on the call, identified based on audio quality statistics collected for calls. Each call is also assigned a rating from zero (the worst) to five (the best) based on an analysis of audio quality metrics such as packet loss, jitter, and latency.
Call relationships: Conversational use cases often involve two or more parties bridged together with a distinct call leg connecting each party to the call. This section lists all of the call legs that were ever connected with a given call, so you can visualize the overall call flow and isolate the source of call quality issues on calls involving multiple parties.
Call hangup cause and hangup source: Why a call hung up and who hung it up are important clues in debugging call issues. Our descriptions of call hangup reasons and hangup sources help you understand why a call was terminated.
Call origination and termination details: We display comprehensive information about the complete routing path taken by Client SDK and carriers calls.
Client SDK calls now include the geographic location of the endpoint and rich metadata about the device used to place the call.
Information about carrier calls includes the media server location of Plivo’s infrastructure and the partner carrier, along with location and end operator details based on the from and to numbers.
Audio quality stats: We measure audio quality via several metrics — network jitter, packet loss, audio level, and network latency (round trip time). High jitter on an audio stream can lead to distorted audio on the receiving end, and high network round trip time (RTT) can result in delayed audio reception. Audio quality stats, per stream and for every call leg, are helpful in isolating the root cause of audio quality issues.
The information from Call Insights makes troubleshooting call issues easier and faster — and to make debugging issues using this data easier still, we’ve created a troubleshooting guide for common call issues as part of our documentation.
Proactive alerts on Plivo client SDKs
Plivo client SDKs for web browsers, iOS, and Android can now monitor call quality and network conditions in real time and send alerts when quality is low. The SDKs emit events for an array of network conditions that might result in a subpar experience on an ongoing call. By altering the application experience based on these events, you can turn a bad situation around for end users.
Call Insights is in public beta. While in beta, Call Insights is available to all Plivo customers at no extra cost. After general availability, premium features will available at a modest cost.
