Chapter 4: Telemetry Setup and Analysis

What is telemetry? It is an automated communication process from multiple data sources. Telemetry helps you to understand what's going on with your software – Does anybody use it? How do they use it? And if something went wrong, then when and why did that happen? In some cases, you will know about the problem even earlier than your customer.

Figure 4.1 – Telemetry sample

When you report to Microsoft regarding some issues with your environment, they always check the telemetry because it will tell them more than you will.

To be clear, you will be familiar with Change Log in Business Central. It is a table where system logs record changes, provided you have set up it before. Telemetry behaves like that. It logs a user's actions and environment events and sends them to cloud storage. You have a set of default events that are being logged automatically, and you could collect the telemetry using code...

Environment telemetry in the Admin portal

We will have an initial encounter with the telemetry and you will understand how to analyze it using the Admin portal.

Here, in the Admin portal, you can find only top-level events from your environments with filters by date and time. Detailed telemetry is available in Application Insights and we will get to know this in the sections that follow.

First of all, open the Admin portal and click on the Telemetry tab.

Figure 4.2 – Telemetry at the Admin portal

To obtain the telemetry, perform the following steps:

1. In the last field, choose the environment required.
2. In the first field, set the start date and time point from which you want to get the telemetry – ask the user about the issue's approximate time and set it here.
3. In the second field, set a time interval in minutes: just set the + or – quantity of minutes.
4. Press the Search button and you will see the telemetry...

Analyzing telemetry

In this section, we will learn how to find the requisite events with KQL and create telemetry alerts.

Let's open Application Insights in the Azure portal, select Logs, and open the query window. Start printing and just select variants from the drop-down menu.

First of all, we can check our logs for errors. Severity levels in Application Insights have different values than in the Admin portal.

To find the errors, we need to select traces according to the third severity level. Therefore, print traces and press Enter. The new line will start with the | symbol. Print where severityLevel == 3. Choose the time interval that you want to analyze. You should get something like this:

Figure 4.18 – KQL query sample

Expand the record and check for the customDimensions element. Here you can see many important values, such as TenantId (if you collect the telemetry for different tenants), environmentName, and...

Summary

Finally, you have come to the end of this chapter! This material was more complex than in the previous chapters. Telemetry setup and analysis require advanced skills and now you have them. You can collect the telemetry from the environment or from the extension. You know where to find your telemetry and how to select the necessary records and analyze them. More than that, you can create your own telemetry wherever you need it. Remember that with telemetry, you can learn about issues with your apps earlier than your customers.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to report issues and outages within your environment to Microsoft.