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We’re thrilled to announce that Video Insights is now available in Public Beta!
Video Insights brings self-service tooling to the Twilio Console to help you observe application usage and quality, discover trends across all your rooms and participants, and troubleshoot issues with ease, leading to higher quality video experiences for your customers, reduced churn, and increased confidence in scaling rapidly.
Twilio strives to provide the best possible developer experience for our customers. This means providing a platform and a toolkit to build innovative video experiences and accelerate time-to-market, but it also means providing the tooling needed to scale your service quickly and reliably, and to do so without sacrificing the quality of experience for your customers. Greater transparency into usage and video call quality has been one of the biggest requests from our customers, and because we only succeed when our customers succeed, we’re excited to announce that Video Insights will come out-of-the-box, at no additional cost for Group, P2P, and WebRTC Go developers.
In this post, we will first showcase some of the highlights and key capabilities and then explain how you can get started with Video Insights today.
Eager to get started? Visit Video Insights in the Twilio Console now.
Video Insights highlights and key capabilities
Monitor the performance of your video application with the new Video Insights Dashboard
As you launch your video application or scale your user base, you are going to need visibility into your application’s usage and performance. The Video Insights Dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of key metrics across all your rooms and participants.
Here’s a quick rundown of the key graphs and how you can use them.
Rooms
Sometimes users will take time out of their day to reach out to your support team when they have a poor video call experience, and sometimes they won’t – they will simply leave. To give you the visibility you need to proactively address issues and retain customers, the Insights Dashboard provides a graph of your rooms over time, with a distribution of rooms that have been tagged as having issues potentially impacting the quality of experience for one or more of your participants.
You can monitor this distribution so you can deploy updates with confidence, or quickly dive into the rooms with issues to start troubleshooting:
Participants
Twilio Programmable Video is built on top of WebRTC. One of the key benefits of WebRTC is that it enables your users to BYOD (bring your own device), but not all device and software setups are created equal in terms of video performance. To help you better understand the setups of your users and to discover commonalities that may be negatively impacting quality, the Insights Dashboard provides a graph of the breakdown of participants over time.
You can segment your participants by key characteristics, such as by browser, and/or filter for participants tagged with issues:
Minutes
When you launch a video application or add video to an existing service, you are going to want to drive adoption and usage. The Insights Dashboard provides a graph of the number of participants and recording minutes over time, along with historical data from the previous period.
You can use it to track week-over-week growth and to gain insight into day-of-week or time-of-day usage:
Troubleshoot issues with ease with Detected Issues
A year ago, we released the Video Log Analyzer console experience to help developers troubleshoot issues as they launch and scale their application. Over the last year, we have been compiling feedback from our customers, and based on this feedback, you will now have a completely revamped troubleshooting experience as part of your Video Insights toolkit, which will supersede the Video Log Analyzer console experience.
One clear need from our customers was the ability to start with a high-level end-user complaint, maybe something like “the quality was bad”, and then efficiently diagnose what actually happened. These complaints can come in all shapes and sizes, and in general, what you start with is a very frustrated end-user with little to no information.
In some cases, issues will be on the end-user's side and you will need to help them help themselves, and in other cases you may need to make changes to your application to fix a bug or make an optimization, but in all cases, your team needs data readily available to diagnose the issue and find the right path forward for your users.
To help you quickly diagnose the issue or identify the “problem” participant, the room summary now surfaces any issues detected based on the quality metrics observed from the call:
You can learn more about the current list of Detected Issues by visiting the Detected Issues section in the docs.
Go a level deeper with per-interval quality metrics for every participant
After identifying the participant of interest, you can visit the Participant Summary for more in-depth information. To help you better evaluate quality over the course of the call for both the audio and video media, Video Insights now includes per-interval quality metric graphs for every participant:
You can learn more about the metrics surfaced by visiting the Participant Summary section in the docs.
Try out Video Insights today
If you are an existing Programmable Video customer, you can get started today by simply visiting the Video Insights Dashboard in the Twilio Console.
If you want to learn more, check out the docs or tune into the Introducing Twilio Video Insights session at our annual SIGNAL Conference.
And if you have not started building with Programmable Video, be sure to check out our quick deploy applications for the Web, iOS, and/or Android:
- Web - https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react
- iOS - https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-ios
- Android - https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-android
You can deploy any of these apps in 5 minutes or less, create a room and invite a few friends or coworkers, and then visit the Twilio Console to check out your insights from the room!
Looking Ahead
This is just the beginning of our Video Insights journey, and we’re excited to partner with you in the coming years as we iterate on the Video Insights toolkit to solve your analytics, monitoring, and troubleshooting needs.
We cannot wait to see you scale to new heights with Twilio Video Insights!
