It is obligatory to consistently check and maintain the health of your environments to have a successful onboarding experience to the cloud service. And, should any health issues occur – successfully and proactively eliminate them.
Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS), which is the administration center, contains a collection of monitoring and diagnostics tools that ensure you have an accurate view of the environments that you manage.
It’s highly recommended to create and utilize a routine to proactively check the telemetry, on a weekly basis, through different types that are available in this environment monitoring.
Telemetry Data
This is the monitoring and diagnostics portal in LCS that has three main use cases: monitoring, diagnostics, and analytics:
- Monitoring, that performs availability and health monitoring ensuring your environment is able to perform business operations;
- Diagnostics – specific tools for troubleshooting issues, should such occur;
- Analytics, which is only can be used by the MS team at the time being to better understand features, gauging its usage.
For these occasions, once you are on the environment monitoring page you will be able to accomplish specific needs based on the page you are on:
- Overview Page – provides a timeline of system usage and user activities;
- Activity Page, that has frequent pre-canned queries with some specific analysis on system usage and user activities;
- Health Metrics – includes critical metrics, such as SQL deadlock info, AOS memory usage, and etc.;
- SQL Insights – Queries, that has predefined queries to get additional query store metrics on demand;
- SQL Insights – Actions, with predefined actions to mitigate issues in a production environment;
- SQL Insigiths – Live View, where you can see your current executing and blocking statements.
PPAC: Diagnostic and Monitoring Tools
Since there are apps that can be run on both Finance & Operations as well as on Dataverse – you should be familiar with how monitoring and diagnostic tools on Power Platform Admin Center work.
To name them all, the monitoring and diagnostics portal has the following tools:
| Environment type | Tools |
| Production systems | Activity monitoring Environment monitoring SQL insights System diagnostics |
| User acceptance testing (UAT)/sandbox | Activity monitoring SQL insights System diagnostics |
| Demo/build | Activity monitoring System diagnostics |
| Environments deployed in customer/partner subscriptions | System diagnostics |
We also would like to highlight Dataverse Analytics, which is part of PPAC and has monitoring adoption. It can give your answers to questions like “what are my most active users?”, “Which my workflows are running?” and so on.
Needless to note, that if you go under capacity, then you can manage storage and performance since you are able to see your storage quota and storage use, top tables, size, and so on.
Service Protection Limits
Dataverse
Service Protection Limits serves the purpose of ensuring consistent availability and performance by limiting API usage. That means, it detects when a client application makes extraordinary demand or request to limit it, protecting MS’ services.
However, the limits will not affect normal users – only those who perform, as we mentioned, extraordinary API requests. The aim is to protect the system from unexpected surges in request volumes.
Finance and Operations Apps
As for F&Oб, there is no such thing as Service Protection Limits. Instead, F&O has priority-based throttling for Odata and Custom Service requests – but only for resource-based throttling. It aims to protect the system from the over-utilization of resources, keeping the system safe.
It’s been said that the MS team works actively on usage-based throttling which will light up in the next calendar year.
Clean-ups
It is the question of time when your database and data will grow till the point where it needs to be cleaned up. Moreover, it is recommended to perform clean-ups on a regular basis. There are some built-in clean-ups routines to ensure the need:
- System Administration:
- Notification Cleanup
- Batch Job History Cleanup
- Database Log Cleanup
- Data Management:
- Job History Cleanup;
- General Ledger:
- Cleanup Ledger Journals;
- Sales and Marketing:
- Delete Sales Orders;
- Delete Quotations;
- Delete Return Orders;
- Sales Update History Cleanup;
- Order Events Cleanup.
- Procurement and Sourcing
- Purchase update History Cleanup;
- Delete REquests for Quotations;
- Draft Consignment Replenishment Order Journal Cleanup;
- Master Planning:
- Plan Version Cleanup.
There are also routines for warehouse and inventory management, production control, and etc. – you may see the whole list here. Needless to say, not all of them may be applicable to your business make sure to read documentation or consult with your partner prior to clean-up.
Archiving
However, not everything can be cleaned up. If you think about transactional data – this is the data that just keeps growing – and needs to be archived in the end.
Microsoft Dataverse Data Archival
Dataverse Archival lets you select a specific root table to then, automatically, pick all child tables and schedule time and date for data to be moved from primary data to secondary storage. At the scheduled time, the process will then copy data to new storage and delete the copied data from the primary Microsoft Dataverse storage.
Finance & Operations Apps
If we look at the Finance & Operations apps, there are already a few limited archive capabilities available for specific scenarios:
- Archive inventory transactions;
- Archive credit card transaction data;
- *Finance and Supply Chain scenario areas are yet planned.
Checklist
As for the end, there are some important bullets about monitoring to keep in mind:
- make yourself familiar with different monitoring tools, not only in LCS but also on the power platform admin center;
- Monitor Production Environment Telemetry;
- Be aware of Service Protection limits;
- Clean up and maintain production periodically;
- Do plan additional performance testing after Go-Live (new scope, new users, etc.);
- Do Read the communication from LCS and take appropriate action.