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Telemetry for Business Central: Everything IT Needs to Know About User Activity

Published Date
Author Tony Castellano

Whether you run Microsoft Business Central online or on-premises, your IT help desk team will love Telemetry for Business Central. This feature, which can be turned on from within Business Central, emits telemetry data for various user activities. Monitoring the data gives your IT team a look at the general health of your environment, applications, and extensions so they can diagnose problems faster and analyze operations that affect performance.  

The telemetry data is gathered by Microsoft Azure Application Insights, a SaaS application that presents the information for analysis via Microsoft Power BI reports. You can enable telemetry on two levels: 

  • Operations that happen in the environment 
  • Application and extension events 

One of the key benefits of Telemetry for Business Central is that IT no longer has to rely on end-users to communicate the content of error messages when they have trouble logging in or accessing data or an application. The system records all errors that occur along with accompanying messages—including those pertaining to user logins, user access, workflow processing, data access, and application performance. IT also gains an understanding of which error messages users think are helpful or unhelpful. 

Simplified Error Logs  

Text BoxTelemetry also simplifies error logs, which can be difficult to understand unless you’re a developer. This makes it easier to determine what users are doing when errors occur and troubleshoot the root causes. Telemetry records activity and errors 24x7, and you can look at the information over any specific time period, including the previous five minutes. 

In addition to troubleshooting individual user errors, you can integrate Telemetry data with Microsoft Power BI to analyze historical error trends by user, business unit, and across the company. You can also leverage the connection between Telemetry and Azure Application Insights to monitor and manage web applications. With the ability to automatically detect performance anomalies and see what users are doing, you can continuously improve application performance and usability. 

Track a Wide Range of Common Operations 

Besides validating AppSource extension submissions and recording the success and failure of extension publishing, synchronization, installations, and upgrades, Telemetry for Business Central tracks a wide range of other common operations: 

  • User onboarding and permission activity 
  • Database deadlocks and lock time-outs 
  • Sign-in attempt success/failure rates 
  • Query wait times 
  • Configuration/environment changes 
  • Number of page views  
  • Email sending failures 
  • Type and number of reports generated 
  • Job queue creation and execution 
  • Table indices added and removed 

In addition to these operations, Telemetry provides cloud migration setup, replication runs, and data upgrade data. IT can also authenticate web server access keys and measure the execution time of incoming and outgoing web service requests. 

To Learn More 

For a complete rundown of all the features, check out the Telemetry for Business Central and the Azure Application Insights resource pages published by Microsoft. And for help with turning on and managing the telemetry function for your Business Central deployment, contact Western Computer today.