Get Low-Friction Go-Lives and Optimize Your Investments with Telemetry Data

Overview

The session explains what Business Central telemetry is, that it is opt-in and designed to be privacy compliant, and how administrators set it up. It then walks through the Business Central usage app in Power BI, with its usage, error, performance and administration reports.

The rest shows how to use the data around go-live: checking which pages, reports, features and integrations were exercised during user acceptance testing, driving errors toward zero with the error dashboard and KPIs, tracking changes, and monitoring sensitive fields. It also covers how partners can use the data in customer meetings to find unused application areas and integration opportunities, and ends with a setup checklist.

Key points

• Telemetry is opt-in and set up by an administrator. It is designed to be privacy compliant, including for GDPR. It can cover one environment or several.
• Setup: create an Azure Application Insights resource first, then enter its connection string in the tenant admin center. This restarts the environment, so do it outside working hours.
• The Power BI usage app comes from AppSource and has usage, error, performance and administration reports. It refreshes nightly and needs a Power BI license. The organization that owns the Application Insights resource should install it.
• During user acceptance testing, the usage report, page views, application highlights, reports usage, feature telemetry and the integrations page show which areas were actually tested. Missing data may mean an area was not tested or is out of scope.
• The error dashboard covers user, integration and system errors. KPIs such as ‘since yesterday’ and ‘last seven days’ help track progress, but they require checking several pages manually.
• Power BI metrics and scorecards can track KPIs automatically and notify Teams. They need Power BI Pro, quoted at $10 USD per month.
• Sensitive field monitoring logs who changed a field, when, and in which table. It does not log the data values.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• codeunit “job queue errors” at 23:33
• report “usage report” at 27:49
• report “connectors report” at 30:58
• report “fixed assets report” at 32:12
• other “business Central usage analytics” at 37:03

Not found in BC28-30: codeunit “job queue errors”, report “usage report”, report “connectors report”, report “fixed assets report”.

Quotes

• 0:24 “go lives and optimize your investments with business central using telemetry data”
• 1:25 “business Central Telemetry is opt in you don’t have to use it um administrators can set it up either you um as a tenant”
• 1:46 “the feature itself has been designed to be privacy compliant we designed privacy into this so whatever you are under gdpr in European union”
• 2:21 “we meaning business Central will lock data about the usage what do users do in business Central errors if something goes wrong performance where”
• 4:15 “business Central Telemetry can have data for multiple environments or a single environment it doesn’t matter”
• 5:36 “if we’re doing it right and if the partner is doing it right with an Eep system your M numbers are likely to be”
• 9:48 “business Central comes with a nice feature called sensitive field monitoring sensitive field monitoring allows the administrator of business Central to to say I”
• 10:28 “the go live phase has many many different things that you on the customer end and the partner on the partner end need to”
• 16:38 “you can use the power Pi report the usage part and you can simply check if if key Pages reports features Integrations have been”
• 17:18 “the error report comes with a built-in dashboard so here you have an overview of all the types of errors that happen in business”
• 18:19 “statistical accounts this is a new feature by the way coming in version 22 2.0 in the finance”
• 21:31 “if you look closely and on some of the pages in the error report you notice might have noticed that there are kpis um”
• 22:31 “this powerbi report is uh for for you to use that you need a powerbi pro license that cost you 10 bucks a month”
• 24:53 “if you set this up during go live and keep it like that you will even get notifications if job cure Era start to”
• 26:21 “what I hate about sales meetings is people wasting my time what do I mean about that here are a few examples”
• 28:35 “Excel layouts was something we developed and this Fairly New Concept it’s only been a year in the product with Excel layouts the end”
• 29:57 “you don’t see any excel here that actually means that you as a customer or if you are a partner this particular customer”
• 34:14 “you need to create what’s called an application insights resource in Asher this is where we lock this data to it’s an Asher resource”
• 35:14 “we introduced this in version 15 which is a few releases ago we are releasing version 22 here in April 2023 so the the”
• 35:14 “Telemetry works both for online and on premises environments so what whatever how you’re hosted doesn’t matter”
• 36:23 “very important that you don’t do this during working hours because this will do a glitch for a few minutes it will”
• 39:05 “the most important thing is that you as a customer and you as a partner taking care of your customers should use data to”

Disclaimers in the video

• 18:19 coming-later: statistical accounts this is a new feature by the way coming in version 22 2.0 in the finance
• 35:34 subject-to-change: we are releasing version 22 here in April 2023

Presenters (as heard): Kenny pontan.