testRTC April 2024 Release Notes

Administration

We are beefing up the security of our platform. This includes quite a few modifications we’re adding to the code. Of these, there is one that will be noticeable to you:

1. Password rules have been put in place and they are rather strict.

Also, we’ve moved our support portal to a new domain. You can officially find it under https://support.testrtc.com/. The pages will remain in the old location for the time being, but they won’t be updated from now on. We will be redirecting all necessary links to the new support site over the coming weeks.

Analysis

• New Insights: We’ve introduced 13 new insights. These now analyze signaling related scenarios around getUserMedia, setLocalDescription and setRemoteDescription, ICE failures and ICE restarts.

  Our plan is to continue beefing up our insights to make sure you spend less time looking at our dashboards and more time fixing issues that we surface quickly through our API and UI.

  For testing, there are now also two new run options allowing you to disable the insights if you wish: #ignore-insights-errors and #ignore-insights-warnings.

  Note: Insights are available as separate licensing on top of the basic testing and monitoring capabilities in testRTC.
• Advanced WebRTC Analytics → Internals: We have renamed Advanced WebRTC Analytics (which was a mouthful to say) into testRTC Internals (based on the webrtc-internals page in Chrome). The button is now smaller on the page as well:
  
  
• Here and there: We’ve been moving fields around a bit in the Overview section to make it more efficient and useful.

qualityRTC

• Welcome the new looks: There’s a new modern look to qualityRTC that we’re sure you’ll love. We’ve spent a major part of the last few months designing and implementing it. And the end result is sleek and useful. There are 4 distinct areas to it, some of them introducing new features as well.
  1. Focused start page: The landing page itself is now focused. It does not show empty result widgets as it did in the past. Instead, we now show only the fields you want filled and the start button. This way, your users are immediately drawn to what they need to do on the page.
  2. Modernized look and feel: The results themselves have been modernized. Good results are shown in black instead of green. Poor results in orange and red (as they used to). This means the user will immediately focus their attention on what needs fixing instead of having their eyes roam all over the page.

     Where it made sense, we also replaced text with visual icons for graphs.

  3. Test result status/score: This is brand new. Test results now open on a status or score value.

     The score indicates how well prepared the user’s device and network are for conducting voice calls (video will be handled in the future for the scoring. Until then, you can use the status indicator instead).

     In layperson terms, the users can now immediately know if they’re good to go or not. They don’t need to be experts in VoIP and understand terms such as RTT, Jitter or packet loss.

     Note: Score is available only for voice tests and is licensed separately.
  4. Recommendations and insights: If things do get sideways, we now offer some recommendations for the user on what’s wrong and how to improve it (where we can figure it out ourselves). This opens a whole new world of self-service capabilities for our qualityRTC customers.

     There are currently around 30 different recommendations in the system, and we plan on enriching and enhancing them further moving forward.

  
  
  
  Note: Insights are licensed separately.
• Here and there:
  1. Some tests used to timeout after 2 minutes when they could have failed sooner and with better error messages. They now do 🙂 .
  2. We’ve added more Customization to CALL QUALITY tests, enabling longer duration of calls where needed.
  3. BANDWIDTH SPEED can now be limited in its maximum bitrate to incur less burden over the local network of the users.
  4. Log information collected on microphone and camera are now a lot more readable and usable.
     
     
  5. New insights were added, mostly covering video tests.
  6. The testRTC companion Chrome extension can now be configured to also collect the open tabs list.

watchRTC

• Trends:
  1. Improved Insights: We are beefing up our testRTC Insights capabilities, and for watchRTC, this means looking at things in History and Trends.

     In History, you can now filter based on these Insights:
     
     

     And in Trends, we have a new set of charts to allow for understanding what issues you need to focus on:
     
     

  2. Top Five: Video resolution graphs now show top 5 instead of every resolution used – it makes these charts more useful.
     
     
  3. New MOS Filter: There’s a new MOS filter available to Highlights and Trends dashboards.
• SDK Improvements:
  1. New version: We have released a new watchRTC SDK version. This version includes many optimizations designed to handle edge cases within the SDK, ensuring seamless connection to the server even in situations involving disconnections and network interruptions. Furthermore, it can now be fully integrated by those seeking to incorporate qualityRTC into their applications.
  2. Updated the stateListener Callback: A new 'reason' field has been added to the stateListener callback. This enhancement enables you to determine the reason for disconnection from the server.
  3. New Peer Connection Event: A new 'Closed' event has been added to the peer connection. This addition simplifies the process of understanding whether the connection was gracefully closed or if the page was simply closed abruptly.

testingRTC

Up until now, our testing probes have been running exclusively on GCP. Starting today, we are migrating them to run on AWS, keeping the option of running them on GCP and on other data centers.

To get to this point, we’ve worked hard in the past year on revamping the whole Docker container and OS level support we had for our probes and have moved it to the capable hands of the operations team at Cyara.

The end results? We can offer more regions across more providers at higher scales.