Showing posts with label KQL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KQL. Show all posts

Friday, July 21, 2023

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list July 2023

2023 Release Wave 2

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

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


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Monday, June 20, 2022

Analyze model-driven apps and Microsoft Dataverse telemetry with Application Insights

Beginning of May 2022, Microsoft announced that the ability to configure an Azure Application Insights resource to receive telemetry on diagnostics and performance of Dynamics 365/Dataverse model driven apps was generally available. 

Integration of Dynamics 365/Dataverse with Application Insights enables new monitoring strategies for Dynamics 365/Dataverse. Application Insights will allow you to detect and resolve issues before the end user notices it.  I also think this is very useful for following up on performance impact during big data loads/migrations (see screenshot below where Dataverse processed 6.1 million requests). Application Insights integration is a nice addition to the already extensive toolkit as outlined in the Monitoring the Power Platform blog series by @pfedynamics



The logs in Application Insights allow you to build queries to troubleshoot and monitor your solutions and answer questions like:

If you want to learn more and see some examples - definitely take a look at the blog post from @decastroallan on Analyzing your Dataverse environment using Application Insights 

The performance insights (preview) for model-driven apps is probably leveraging the same telemetry but since you now have access to the raw data in the underlying logs it will be easier to pin point potential issues or discover ways to improve the performance and/or user experience. 

KQL (Kusto Query Language) can be used to query the logs in Application Insights in a scalable fashion  - KQL can be used to also query other Azure components like Azure Log Analytics, Microsoft Defender and Azure Data Explorer. KQL is a SQL-like query language which is powered by the Kusto Engine that allows you to query, filter, sort and aggregate data. It was built specifically built for the cloud and scales quite well. Unlike SQL, KQL can not create, update or delete data - it is purely meant to be used for query operations.

References:


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Friday, March 20, 2020

Azure Application Insights for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solution architects and consultants

A best practice which is quite often overlooked is enabling monitoring and logging capabilities in your applications or solutions. You should always monitor your applications/solutions whether they run in the cloud or on premise because you want to know when something fails (before the users start complaining) and also understand how users are working with your solutions.



Both Dynamics 365 and Power Platform have the option to enable integration with Azure Application Insights - but what is Application Insights?

Azure Application Insights  is a feature of Azure Monitor and it is basically an APM (Application Performance Management) tool. Application Insights provides standard integration with a lot of Azure components adding automatic monitoring capabilities but you can also extend it with custom monitoring so if you get an exception in your code that is unhandled Azure Application Insights will pick this up. You can use it for on-premise and cloud applications but the ease with which you can instrument your applications might differ.


You can integrate Application Insights into your model-driven apps (either Dynamics 365 first party apps which you extended or completely custom-model driven apps) by using the Javascript SDK (See Application Insights for web pages for more details). Unfortunately the old documentation on this topic has disappeared - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-insights-sample-mscrm/ now does a redirect to the general document. 
Luckily @DanzMaverick wrote an interesting plugin for XrmToolBox which allows you to easily instrument your different model driven forms.  Be sure to update to the latest version though since it contains a number of fixes. If you want to keep up to date with updates on this interesting tool follow https://github.com/Power-Maverick/ApplicationInsightsManager


Using Application Insights Manager plugin you will be able to instrument a number of different model forms using just a number of clicks - behind the scenes it will wire up your forms with the required JavaScript web resources.



A recent update on the Power Platform also allows you to log telemetry for your Canvas Apps using Application Insights.

Dynamics 365 can also leverage Azure components like Azure web apps, web jobs or Azure functions which will also require monitoring and logging capabilities. Depending on the type of component you might get out of the box monitoring or you might need to use code based monitoring - most scenarios are described in the documentation - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview

Things I learned when using Azure Application Insights in the last couple of months:

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