Telemetry for non-technical people

Telemetry sounds technical, but it can help a finance director or IT manager answer simple questions: why is the system slow, which jobs are failing, and what happens during updates? Business Central can send data to Azure Application Insights. The article explains in plain language what you can get from it and what it requires. It does not require you to write code.

Telemetry and what it shows

Telemetry is continuous measurements and events that Business Central sends about what happens in an environment. Microsoft Learn describes that they are collected in Azure Application Insights, a service in Azure where data can be analysed and displayed.

You have to create an Application Insights resource in Azure yourself and set the environment up to send data to it. A partner or your IT department can do that. Telemetry is not the same as the change log. The log shows who changed data, while telemetry shows how the system behaves.

The list of signals at Microsoft is long. For a non-technical person, these areas are usually the most useful.

Errors: error dialogs that users have seen.
Performance: slow SQL queries and slow AL methods.
Locking: deadlocks and locks that time out.
Job queue: creation and running of job queue entries.
Environment lifecycle: updates, copies and moves.
Extensions: installation, update and errors.
Permissions: changes and permission errors.
Web services: incoming and outgoing calls and their response times.

How you see the data

Data is stored as log entries in Application Insights, and you can write queries in the language KQL. You do not have to write them yourself. Microsoft offers two free Power BI apps, one for environments and one for apps and extensions, which show telemetry in reports. Both require Power BI Pro licences.

You can have a partner make a few fixed views that answer your questions.

Alerts

You can set up alerts so that you are notified when something happens, instead of having to look. Microsoft mentions Application Insights alerts, Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate. Examples are an alert when several job queue entries fail or a message when an update to the environment is available.

Costs and privacy

Application Insights is billed by the amount of data sent and how long it is stored. Check the current price with Microsoft, and read the page on managing costs. When an environment is copied, the connection to Application Insights is copied with it, so a sandbox can send data to the same resource. Remove or change the connection if you do not want that.

Telemetry can contain user identifiers. Clarify with your data protection officer what may be collected and how you handle it.

Three questions and planning

Why is it slow? Here you can see whether particular queries or methods are slow and whether there are locks. Which jobs are failing? Here you can see the status of job queue entries. What happened in the update? Here you can see when it ran and whether it succeeded.

If you can formulate the question, a partner can usually find the answer.

Agree who owns the Application Insights resource, who may see the data and how long data is kept. Set a spending limit in Azure so that costs do not run away. Also choose whether sandboxes should send to the same resource or whether you want to filter them out.

Getting started

Start small. Turn on telemetry for production, choose three questions and let them decide what you measure. Addverk is a new Business Central partner. See our services and prices if you want help setting it up.