Integrating Application Insights with Dataverse provides powerful telemetry capabilities, enabling us to monitor, optimize, and enhance system performance effectively. This integration offers deep visibility into various aspects, including the unified interface, page loads, network requests, API calls, plugin executions, and SDK activities.
Let’s dive into how these telemetry insights work and how they can be leveraged for better system health monitoring.
Telemetry Data in D365 CE Applications
Application Insights captures and maps telemetry events to standard schema tables in Dataverse. For example:
- Dataverse API calls are logged in the request table.
- Exceptions from plugins or SDK executions are stored in the exceptions table.
This structured mapping enables easy querying, analysis, and visualization through dashboards. By leveraging telemetry, we can proactively identify performance bottlenecks, error trends, and optimization opportunities.
Key Use Cases
Application Insights provides actionable insights into Dataverse operations, offering:
- Performance Monitoring – Track API call response times and page load speeds.
- Error Detection – Identify failed plugin executions and SDK exceptions.
- Dependency Analysis – Understand interactions between components and external services.
- User Interaction Tracking – Analyze how users engage with the system.
Callout: “Telemetry provides insights, not activity logs.”
By analyzing metrics like page loads, exceptions, and network requests, we can proactively address issues and ensure system reliability. Additionally, custom metrics, such as user interactions, help refine solutions to meet specific needs.
However, for compliance and detailed user action logs, Application Insights is not the ideal tool. Instead, specialized tools such as Comprehensive Auditing or Admin Activity Logging are more appropriate. Let’s explore these next.
Activity Logging and Auditing
While Application Insights is excellent for monitoring telemetry and operational performance, it should not be used for auditing or activity logging.
For these purposes, Power Platform offers Comprehensive Auditing and Admin Activity Logging. These tools ensure detailed records of user activities, system changes, and governance compliance.
Implementing Custom Telemetry in Dataverse
Out-of-the-box telemetry in Dataverse provides valuable insights into operations like API calls and plugin executions. However, it might not cover all custom business logic metrics.
To bridge this gap, Dataverse allows custom telemetry implementation using the ILogger interface within plugin code.
For example, if you’ve developed a custom plugin to handle a complex business process, leveraging ILogger enables you to:
- Monitor execution flow.
- Capture exceptions.
- Measure performance metrics specific to your logic.
This level of detailed monitoring enhances observability and reliability, enabling proactive issue detection and resolution.
How to Implement Custom Telemetry
- Enable Application Insights integration for your environment.
- Modify your plugin code to utilize the ILogger interface to log custom telemetry events.
- Analyze logs in Application Insights to gain visibility into execution details and optimize performance.
By implementing custom telemetry, organizations can gain deeper insights into their operations, ultimately improving performance, reliability, and user experience within Dataverse.