Chapter 3: Environment Details and Notifications Setup

Environment management is not only limited to creating, copying, and deleting functions. You can set up access to your environments, create and restore backups, schedule updates, and many more things. In addition, you can set up notifications of some events to your email to avoid opening the Admin Center every day, waiting for an environment update, for example.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• Detailed information about your environment
• Security group setup
• Notifications setup
• Upgrade scheduling
• Apps and sessions
• Database export
• Backup restore

After this chapter, you will be able to perform full environment management, manage updates, restore backups, and create database copies.

Detailed information about your environment

Detailed environment information is hidden in the environment card. You can open it by clicking on the environment's name in the environments list.

The environment card looks like this:

Figure 3.1 – The environment card

The card has the following sections.

Action buttons

These are placed on the top of the card and used for different things you can do with the environment. In this section, you will get a short introduction, and all the actions will be explained in detail in the next sections. You have the following actions available:

1. Apps: This is a package of functionality. The standard one is provided by Microsoft; and the additional ones are provided by you or third parties. This consists of the list of apps installed in your environment, with names, publishers, versions, and available updates. This list does not belong to the only chosen environment – you can choose any of your...

The security group setup

In this section, you will learn how to restrict access to your environments with a simple security group setup. But why would you want to restrict access to the environment? Usually, this happens when you have created an environment for some specific operations. This could be a production or sandbox environment. Maybe you don't want all users to have access to this environment's data or you want to test something new and prevent users from creating operations here. Whichever way, we can set up a limitation policy.

Let's look at the setup steps:

1. First of all, open the Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/) and search for groups:

Figure 3.7 – The Azure Groups search

2. After that, click on the New group action to create a new security group:

Figure 3.8 – The Azure Groups list

3. Set Group type as Security, and input the group name and group description. Let...

Notification setup

In this and the next sections, we will look at cloud environment updates and how to prepare and schedule them. But first of all, we need to know that an update is available. Opening the Admin Center and checking for updates every day is not a practical way. So, let's take a look at functions such as notification recipients.

Important Note

It is highly recommended to set up notification recipients just after you create your first environment to prevent an unexpected update.

Notification recipients

1. Open the Admin Center and click on the Notification Recipients tab. Then, click on the + Add recipient button:

Figure 3.12 – Notification Recipients

2. Then, fill in the recipient's name and email address, and press Save:

Figure 3.13 – The Add recipient dialog

These are the following notifications that the selected account will get after a notification setup:

• A major...

Upgrade scheduling

As we know from previous chapters, there are two update types that you can schedule:

• Major updates – twice a year in April and October
• Minor updates – usually on the first Friday of the month, except for April and October

So, you've got a notification that a new update is available. What are your next actions?

Important Note

If you do not set the upgrade date, your environment will be updated on any day between the default date and the last upgrade date. This can cause an interruption of a normal user's work.

Environment updates are managed by Microsoft, and all that you need to do is schedule them. Before you schedule your production environment update, I would advise you to do the following things:

• Set an update date of the production environment in the future for two reasons:
  1. I want to ensure that my per tenant extensions are fully compatible with the incoming update, so I will update the sandbox environment...

Apps and sessions

The Admin Center helps you to manage many things related to your environments. This includes Microsoft standard apps and apps from AppSource that you have installed in your environment:

1. Open an environment card and click on the Apps button at the top. You will see a list of your apps (per tenant extensions are not included):

Figure 3.20 – The apps list

Here, you can see that one app from AppSource has an available update. If you click on Install Update button, the status will change to Update is scheduled, and within some time, the update will install to your environment. If you did not apply app updates, work with the old version of the app until the next major environment update, when it will apply automatically:

Figure 3.21 – Apps update

2. Sometimes, you can see the Button required status – click on it and read what you need to do to upgrade this app. Usually, you need to update...

Database export

You may want to create your cloud database export – for example, to deploy extra test environments, provide database copy to some third party, or even migrate from SaaS to on-premises.

How do you export your database if it is somewhere in the cloud? This is a very important question, which we will discuss in this section.

First of all, let me notify you about some database export limitations:

• You are able to export databases only for a production environment.
• You are able to perform 10 exports per month.
• You must be delegated admin or admin in the current organization. Your Business Central user must have the D365 BACKUP\RESTORE permission set assigned.
• Your Dynamics 365 Business Central license must be paid.

Now, we can start our database export. You are able to export databases to Azure Storage accounts only. This means that you must have a paid or trial Azure subscription to perform this button. If you don't have a suitable...

Backup restore

Sometimes, things go totally wrong and your database is crushed, or you need to roll out some situation. Or maybe everything is okay and you just need to refer to some earlier data. In both cases, we can use database restore. Also, the good news is that you don't need to take care of backup policies manually using the Business Central SaaS. Backups are created automatically, and you just need to choose a point of restoration.

But not everything is ideal; there are some limitations:

1. You can restore your backups up to 28 days in the past.
2. You can restore your environment only to the same version you have now. So, after each minor or major update, your 28-day restoration period shrinks to 0 and starts again.
3. You need the same permissions as a database export.
4. Restoration is limited to 10 times per month.
5. You can't restore a deleted environment from the Admin Center – contact Microsoft support for this.
6. Sandbox environments...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered a lot of situations that you can encounter as a Business Central administrator. You learned how to get environment details, limit access to the environment, and set up notifications about available updates and schedule them. You now know how to update installed apps, restart a cloud environment, and manage user sessions. Finally, you learned important things such as how to export your database and restore a backup.

In the next chapter, we will move on to telemetry analysis.