One of the biggest concerns we hear from customers who are on the Business Central SaaS product is the inability to investigate performance issues in their Business Central SaaS tenant. In on-premise implementations, Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV) admins and developers could analyze the performance of their service tier as well as their SQL server when users reported performance issues. That is no longer the case in the world of multi-tenancy and SaaS. While most understand the reasoning for not having this type of access to a Multi-Tenant environment, it still leaves a gap in a product that experienced admins and developers miss.
What is Microsoft doing about this pain point? Enter, Application Insights.
Application Insights is an application performance management tool that assists developers and admins to diagnose issues and gain an understanding of how people are using their web application. You can read more about Azure Application Insights HERE.
With the Business Central team at Microsoft enabling this integration, there is now the ability to send telemetry data to Application Insights (when enabled). Admins and developers can then diagnose problems and review telemetry that may cause adverse effects on performance.
What types of telemetry data are sent to Application Insights from Business Central?
The Business Central integration to Application Insights is still in its early stages of deployment, but the telemetry that is being sent is growing with every release of Business Central. As of the 2020 Wave 2 release, the following telemetry is sent to Application Insights from Business Central:
|
Type |
Description |
|
Authorization |
Provides information about user sign-in attempts. Information includes success or failure indication, reason for failure, user type, and more. |
|
Long Running Operation |
Provides information about SQL queries that take longer than expected to execute. |
|
Report Generation |
Provide information about the execution of reports. |
|
Web Service Requests |
Provide information about execution time of web service requests. |
This telemetry type chart was taken from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/telemetry-overview
How do we enable the connection between Application Insights and Business Central?
Enabling Application Insights is available for both On-Premise and SaaS deployments of Business Central. Microsoft provides detailed instructions on how to enable this in both your Azure and Business Central environments:
Business Central SaaS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/tenant-admin-center-telemetry#appinsights
Business Central On-Premise: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/telemetry-enable-application-insights
If you need help setting up this feature in your Business Central environment, please reach out to Innovia and we can help you get it enabled!
