Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Azure DevOps - historical graph for agent pools (Preview)

If you want to catch up with all features/improvements released  on Azure DevOps - you can take a look at the Azure DevOps Feature timeline. One of the cool features which went in preview in December 2020 is the historical graph for agent pools (Preview) - which is extremely useful if you are working with a large team of developers and you need to know whether you need to add additional build agents. Microsoft recently updated the documentation on Historical graph for agent pools (Preview) | Microsoft Docs .



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Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Update to Power Platform and Dynamics 365 request limits and allocations

Microsoft updated the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 request limits and allocations (also referred to as entitlement limits) end of last year and upped the allocated limits significantly, which is great news. At the same time Microsoft also announced their planning on enforcement of the API request limits and availability of reports to track the number of API calls at tenant level (reports expected in first quarter of 2022 - long awaited since it first announced in 2019) 

All table/entity CRUD operations - both calls that originate from internal and external sources will count towards a tenant level allocation of requests in a 24 hour window. If you go above this allocated limit you are expected to buy additional API licensing packs. 

Especially external integrations and/or business logic (even plugin executions count against these limits) might cause spikes in API calls but so far not a lot of attention was paid to it especially since the limits are currently not enforced. 


These integrations typically use non-licensed users ( e.g. application users, non-interactive users, administrative users or System) also consume allocated API requests and this is where you will need to pay more attention - especially in environments with relative high integration volume and low volume of fully licensed users.

So let's take an example to illustrate the increases in default allocated API capacity - suppose you expect 1 million API calls in a 24 hour period in your tenant and you have 100 users with Dynamics 365 licenses in your environment - then you either need to purchase a number of licensing packs - list price +/- 50€ per month per pack (but I recommend reaching out to your licensing partner to get an up to date quote) or use the new Pay as You Go subscription model which is currently in preview. 



The available capacity has been upped quite significantly with allocated base capacity now at 500.000 API calls (previously 100.000 API calls) and an additional 5.000 calls per licensed Dynamics 365 user (see Non-licensed user request limits  for details and exceptions). Also the number of API calls per licensing pack has increased to 50.000 (previously 10.000)

The list price of the licensing pack which I found seems to be 50€ per month per pack (I would recommend reaching out to your licensing partner to get an exact price) which seems to be similar to the price in the past if my memory serves my As part of the pay as you go model there will be a separate meter available - see Pay-as-you-go meters - Power Platform requests.

Currently you can only view the number API requests in the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) on a per environment basis in the dashboard for Dataverse API call statistics - if you can't wait for the new reporting to become available I would recommend starting from this one to get an indication of number of API calls.


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Friday, January 14, 2022

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list January 2022

2021 Retrospective

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform consultants, project managers and power users

Friday, January 07, 2022

Notes and links for the AZ-900 Azure fundamentals exam

As a Microsoft CRM technical consultant/developer/architect you should have at least a basic understanding of Azure Cloud and how you can combine Dynamics 365 CE and Azure. 

Although I have been using Azure Cloud together with multiple Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement projects since 2015 I thought it was a good idea to check my overall understanding by doing the AZ-900 exam (which I passed). The exam does not cover any topics in depth but studying for it gives you a good overview and can be used as a starting point to delve deeper in specific topics;




Listed below are some of the links and resources that I used - mainly on topics where I had less hands-on experience from projects so this is definitely not an exhaustive list. 

General training material to get started

Architectural components
Management tools
Security and identity management
Networking

Governance and compliance