What's new in Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry - February 2024
Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan
Supporting Ukraine | Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. | Helping small and medium sized companies run their business with ERP and analytics |
It is February and it has been a month since the last newsletter.
This will also be the last monthly newsletter on telemetry from my side. I started writing monthly news on the topic back in October 2022. Back then, a lot of things happened in this space and one of our MVPs told me that he loved how I tweeted on all the news, but that it was hard to keep up. Therefore, I started the newsletter. But for the last 3 months, I have not had a lot of information to share. Probably because the feature now is mature and well adopted, and because the telemetry documentation has everything that is needed (including short videos).
I will keep writing new editions for the newsletter on all the topics that I am passionate about, also on telemetry when I have news to share. Just don’t expect to get monthly telemetry news anymore…
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Anyway, Let’s go…
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In the February 2023 edition, read about these things:
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Purview logs vs. telemetry
According to the release plan document
for the 2024 release wave 1,
auditable events occurring in Dynamics 365 Business Central environments are emitted to Microsoft Purview, allowing administrators to monitor and audit events across Business Central and other Microsoft services in a single place.
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Since the release plan went public, there has been some speculation and questions on how this new Purview thing differs from plain old telemetry in Business Central. So, let me explain the difference between the two concepts as I understand them.
I can think of at least two scenarios where Purview would be very useful:
Scenario 1: customer is being audited (this is also sometimes referred to as “the auditors are here and they are asking questions!”
Scenario 2: customer is investigating an incident. Something bad happened, such as (suspected) fraud – money was transferred out, bribes – who gave that rebate?, or a security incident - Incident – who installed/uninstalled that extension
In all these cases, you want to know: “Who did What When?”. And that is exactly what is logged to Purview. Purview has been designed for auditing, so there are user interfaces for querying data, and it is a trusted data source that many Microsoft products already log privileged audit data to.
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While telemetry in Business Central also logs some events that can be used for auditing, the telemetry feature was not designed for auditing. Especially the “Who” part of the “Who did What When?” question is a challenge. This is because the Business Central telemetry feature was designed with privacy build-in. While it is possible to log a telemetry user id, this identifier can be deleted/changed on the user card, which then cuts the tie between the user in Business Central and the telemetry user id in the telemetry database.
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But for KQL fan boys and girls (and in-betweens or prefer not to answers), there is a treat: Purview allows the administrator to query the audit logs with… KQL ??
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Power BI Usage apps – February updates
The February updates for both the app usage app bring small fixes and minor improvements that just might help you be more productive with telemetry. There are no changes to the usage app this month.
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App Usage app (for ISVs)
This update adds the Domain columns to many reports (you need to set up the mapping in a parameter).
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Usage report
On 'Locations' page, added Domain to location by environment visual.
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Performance report
On page ‘Long Running Queries’, added Domain to visuals.
On all pages: added Domain to global filters.
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领英推荐
Administration report
On page 'Extension lifecycle', added Domain to visuals.
On all pages: added Domain, Environment name/type, AAD tenant, and Partner to global filters.
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Blog posts and videos
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Microsoft MCT and performance expert Duilio Tacconi blogged about Measuring SaaS UI stability: Standard Deviation and the rollercoaster effect in this blog post: https://duiliotacconi.com/2024/01/09/measuring-saas-ui-stability-standard-deviation-and-the-rollercoaster-effect/
and about How to spot post-update performance trends in SaaS in this blog post:
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Did you know that the BCTech repo has pages with links to blog posts and videos on telemetry?
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If you create blog posts/videos on telemetry (or know of things that are not linked from these two pages), feel free to do a pull request to the repository (or send me an email/message).
Signup to the newsletter (and/or spread the word)
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That's it for the February 2024 newsletter. If you made it all the way down here, then you are truly a Telemetry Hero.
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If you liked the newsletter and think that others might benefit from it as well, please send them the signup link here:
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All earlier posts are also available from there.
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PS. It is not too late to rate the Power BI apps on Appsource ?? Your feedback matters (a lot).
Do it here:
(for environment telemetry)
or
(for app telemetry)
Microsoft MVP | D365 BC | M365 | Azure | PhD, MBA
1 年Thanks for the great telemetry updates Kennie.. now that’s in a great place what is your next focus going to be?
Your blogs are always so helpful. Thank you for sharing them!