February Updates: Showcase, Gold Credits & Smarter Connectivity Insights

This February update (Version 1.1.0) focuses on making rtcStats more accessible and insightful. As we continue to refine the platform, we are introducing new ways to share your sessions, more generous testing credits for new users, and a deeper set of observations to catch those tricky connectivity edge cases.

Let's dive into what's new! 🤿

🚀 Major Improvements

Showcase & YouTube Integration: Learning from Real-World Scenarios 📺

Sharing a public session is a powerful way to collaborate, but metrics only tell half the story. To help you better understand the "why" behind the data, we are now using rtcStats to share our own expertise by testing the latest WebRTC services out there.

We've launched two major features to bridge the gap between visual experience and technical analysis:

• The Showcase Page: We've created a curated Showcase page where we host public sessions from popular WebRTC products we've tested. This is a dedicated space for you to explore real-world data and see how different services handle their services. It's the perfect way to discover the full diagnostic possibilities of rtcStats.
• YouTube Analysis Sync: Each session in the Showcase comes with a YouTube video attached. These videos feature our own recordings and technical analysis of the session. You can watch the video to hear our breakdown of the call quality and then dive into the live metrics yourself to see exactly what the data looks like during those specific moments.

Showcase & YouTube Integration: Learning from Real-World Scenarios

By opening up these sessions, we're giving you full access to all metrics alongside our expert commentary. It's a hands-on way to learn how to interpret complex WebRTC scenarios using rtcStats.

And don't worry - we've got ~20 additional services lined up already for our analysis - it just takes a wee bit of time to record them…

5 Gold Credits for New Accounts 🪙

We want everyone to experience the power of our AI Summaries and Observations. Starting now, every new account is automatically allocated 5 Gold Credits:

• What are credits? To simplify things, a credit is a single file upload and analysis in rtcStats.
• What are they for? Use them to test our AI-powered analysis engine and observations, which transform raw logs into a narrated summary of your call's health.
• Try it out: If you haven't signed up yet, now is the perfect time to explore the premium features of rtcStats for free.

New Observations: Catching Hidden Connectivity Issues 🔍

The "Observations" engine is the heart of rtcStats, and it just got smarter. We've added several new triggers to help you diagnose complex signaling and ICE issues:

• Exposed Internal IPs: Flags when an internal IP is exposed via a prflx candidate.
• Missing TURN Candidates: Detects when a TURN server is configured but no TURN candidates are gathered.
• TURN-Only Limitations: Alerts you if the application restricted the candidates strictly to TURN.
• Slow Signaling & Gathering: New observations for when the time to gather STUN/TURN candidates is too slow, or when the signaling phase itself lags.

New Observations: Catching Hidden Connectivity Issues

🛠️ Other Enhancements

Better Connection Metrics 📈

Accuracy in timing is everything when debugging. We've added new metrics to the Connection panel:

• Time to first candidate: Track exactly how long it takes to get the first UDP, TCP, TLS, or STUN candidate.
• Signaling time: In the same manner, we show how long the first messages exchange takes.
• Contextual labels: We've added labels within the connection details to explain why certain values are considered "bad" or sub-optimal.
• Improved layout: The connection panel has been redesigned for better readability.

Better Connection Metrics

Some Fresh UI ✨

• Observations: The Observations UI has been updated with a cleaner design to help you spot issues even faster. See the most important observations first and when they occurred.
• Connections: The connection panel has been redesigned for better readability.
• Enumerate Devices: You can now see the enumerateDevices event directly within the Devices pane, giving you more visibility into the user's hardware setup.

🐞 Bug Fixes

• rtcStats format: Fixed an issue in the Logs pane where certain events were missing or displayed incorrectly when using the rtcStats-specific format.
• Upload: Improved error handling - users will now receive a clear error message when trying to upload AEC dumps (which are not supported) instead of a generic failure.

We're excited to see how you use the new Showcase and YouTube features to share your WebRTC insights! As always, the latest version of rtcstats-js is available - make sure you're up to date to get the best out of these new features.

Happy debugging! 💎