Help desk personnel know the typical support call scenario only too well. It often goes something like this…
User: I tried to create an invoice and got an error message.
Help Desk: OK, what was the error message?
User: I don’t remember.
With no additional information, the support technician usually has to set up a shared-screen session to see if they can talk the user through recreating the error. If the error can’t be recreated—almost always the case—they have to wait until it happens again. This creates frustration for both the user and the technician.
Tracking the Health of Your Environment, Applications and Extensions
A great new tool from Microsoft that overcomes this challenge is Telemetry for Business Central. The feature can be turned on from within Business Central to emit telemetry data for various user activities. Monitoring the data gives your IT team a look at the general health of your environment, applications, and extensions so they can diagnose problems faster and analyze operations that affect performance.
Western Computer recently enabled Telemetry for Business Central for one of our 365REMAN customers, a US-based distributor, supplier, and remanufacturer of diesel fuel systems, turbochargers, and engines. The customer relies on 365REMAN—a Business Central ERP solution customized for remanufacturers—to manage inventory, core banking, core returns, bill-of-materials teardowns, and core inspections.
One of the telemetry features the customer values most is the Error Dialog Statistics view as shown below:
This view includes a column showing exact error messages presented to users. In the invoice creation scenario described previously, the technician would not have to worry if the user did not record the error message. The technician can call it up in near real time, and then drill down into other data presented by the Error Dashboard to find out what else was happening in the environment.
Another report this customer appreciates is Incoming Web Service Calls:
With this data, the customer notes the average load times for incoming web service calls to know which ones warrant an investigation. They can also access the same report for Outgoing Web Service Calls.
Wide Range of Operations Reporting
Telemetry for Business Central divides reporting into four main sections—usage, errors, performance, and administration—while tracking a wide range of other common operations. Here’s a sampling:
- User onboarding and permission activity
- Database deadlocks and lock time-outs
- Sign-in attempt success/failure rates
- Query wait times
- Configuration/environment changes
- Number of page views
- Email sending failures
- Number of reports generated
- Job queue creation and execution
- Table indices added and removed
Our 365REMAN customer also utilizes AL Method Statistics to assist with performance tuning and Environment Lifecycle Events to identify when application and extension updates occur as shown in the images below:
Key Telemetry Benefits
Business Central telemetry data is gathered by Azure Application Insights, a SaaS application that also presents analysis via Power BI reports. The reports provide summary information as far as daily and weekly users, and you can dive in to see the times of day and the days of the week that are most busy.
This can be useful if you experience performance issues at certain times of the day, such as when most of the users are in the system. Other key benefits include the ability to track application performance to identify common user issues, measure the usage of application features and fields, set performance baselines to check against when errors occur, and to gain insights into what objects are used when errors occur.
For a complete rundown of all the features, check out the Telemetry for Business Central and the Azure Application Insights resource pages published by Microsoft. And for help with turning on and managing the telemetry function for your Business Central instance, contact Western Computer today.
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