Microsoft Dynamics 365. Business Central telemetry. Triage errors using a
Power BI report.
Business Central emits telemetry data for various activities and operations
on tenants and extensions.
Monitoring telemetry gives you insight into activities and the health
of your tenants so you can diagnose problems and analyze
operations that affect performance.
This video shows how to use a standard Power BI
report to analyze errors using telemetry.
The report is available from the Business Central telemetry samples
GitHub repository.
We'll download the report. Get an application ID from Azure
Application Insights and then we'll explore the error report in
Power BI Desktop.
Prerequisites for using the report is to have enabled telemetry
on one or more Business Central environments or extensions and
access to the Azure Applications Insight Resource that stores the
data. We'll also need power BI desktop.
Let's start by downloading the reports.
Will open a browser and type AKA dot Ms/
BC telemetry samples to open the BC tech repository.
Now we'll choose the Power BI directory,
then reports, and then error report. To download
the report, we'll choose Download.
Will open the report to start configuring it.
We need an application ID from the Azure Application Insights
resource that stores the telemetry data.
We need the key so that we can read data
from Azure Application Insights.
On the Application Insights page in the Azure portal, under
Configure on the Navigation Pane, we'll choose API Access,
and then use the Copy to clipboard action to copy
the application ID.
We'll paste the Application Azure Insights application ID in the
App ID field, and then define the period of time
we want to analyze by specifying start and end dates.
We can also add an AAD tenant ID and an
environment name as additional filters.
Especially for extension telemetry, sometimes it's useful to leave these
fields blank if we have enabled Azure Application Insights for
multiple environments.
If we have a lot of data and just want
to experiment,
we might consider using the Top parameter to limit the
number of rows that each data source in the report
will fetch from Azure Application Insights.
When we choose Load, the report will refresh with data.
This can take a few minutes, depending on the amount
of data we have.
Authentication from Power BI to Application Insights only works if
both resources belong to the same AAD tenant ID,
the organizational account.
OK, here's our report. Let's start with the ReadMe tab.
There are two things that are especially important to notice.
First, there's guidance on the difference between the Power BI
report and the Jupyter notebooks for troubleshooting.
Second, depending on our version of Business Central,
we might not have data for every tab in the
report.
There's a link to the Signal Overview page, where we
can find out when different types of signals were added
to Business Central.
The Readme Error Types tab shows the telemetry event IDs
to look for if we want to dig deeper into
a particular topic using the Kusto Query Language.
For example, if we want to analyze an issue with
log-in errors,
we can filter on the RT0001 and RT0002
event IDs in our Kusto queries.
Now let's explore some error data.
We won't cover all of the tabs in the report
in this video,
just highlight some of the frequent situations that we might
need to troubleshoot.
We can use the Authorization tab to figure out why
a user can't sign in.
There could be multiple reasons for that.
For example, maybe the user doesn't have a valid license,
or maybe the user is not enabled.
The Authorization Errors tab shows us when and why sign-ins
fail.
The Email Errors tab helps us keep emails flowing for
our customers.
For example, if a customer is experiencing that emails are
not being sent from Business Central,
we can identify when the failure happened and which email
connector was used.
We can use the extension lifecycle errors tab to analyze
problems compiling,
installing, or updating extensions. This part of the error report
is especially useful for ISVs because it provides a quick
overview of all errors that happen with your app across
all your Business Central environments.
If we call web service endpoints in Business Central,
we can use the Incoming Web Service Errors tab to
analyze requests that did not return an HTTP status code
in the 200 range.
The tab shows which endpoints are failing and the category
of the endpoint, such as API, SOAP, or Odata.
Let's move on to the Job Queue Errors tab.
We can always monitor failed job queue jobs in the
Business Central client,
but what if we want to see failures across multiple
environments, or data outside the retention policy period of the
job queue log?
On the Job Queue Errors tab we can analyze job
queue failures and filter by environment, code unit, or object
type.
Using the Outgoing Web Service Errors tab,
we can go deeper into errors that happen in services
we connect to from Business Central.
We can go from an endpoint to the codeunit
behind, it or from a codeunit to the endpoints
that use it.
If the endpoint is owned by a third party,
we can use the report to highlight stability issues in
their service
when contacting the third party's support organization.
Finally, we have the Report Errors tab.
In this video we don't have any data to show,
and that's actually a good thing because the report shows
situations where a commit statement was issued in a report
that was canceled by user or by the Business Central
server. If we had data here,
we might have an issue because not all code in
the report was run after the commit statement.
Our documentation has details about this situation,
so go to the Readme Error Types tab to learn
more about error types.
And that's it, at least for now.
To learn more about Power BI reports based on telemetry
in Azure Applications Insights, visit
aka.ms/bctelemetrysamples. You'll find links to sample reports and
additional information about how to connect Power BI to telemetry
in Azure Application Insights.
If you're interested in learning more about Business
Central and telemetry, this playlist offers several other videos on
the subject.
There's one that shows how to get started with Application
Insights,
another about analyzing performance using a standard Power BI report,
which is much like what we saw in this video.
One that shows how to write custom queries in Kusto,
and one about troubleshooting using Jupiter notebook guides.
Thanks for watching. Microsoft logo.