Chapter 6: Tenant Capacity Management

Compared with on-premises, SaaS environments have some limitations, and capacity is one of them. When you decide to implement and use Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must evaluate your business and the operations that you perform because your cloud storage is limited. If you are a big customer (we'll discuss what this is later in the chapter) and choose SaaS, you could be out of capacity after some time and have to buy capacity add-ons with extra costs. Another way is to set up retention policies and delete the old data or compress it. All of these processes will be covered in this chapter.

We are going to cover the following main topics:  

• Storage capacity usage
• Environments quota usage
• Storage usage by environment
• Some practical advice on how to keep your data within limits
• Big customers

After this chapter, you will be able to manage your cloud storage and predict a lack of capacity. In addition...

Storage capacity usage

As this is a very important part of the administration process, Microsoft put Capacity management into a separate tab of Admin Center. You can find it in the last menu tab.

Figure 6.1 – Capacity tab

The first thing that you see is the Storage capacity usage tab. It shows you the total storage amount that you have for all of your environments, used and available space. You can look just at these numbers and understand whether everything is OK with your storage or you need to clear the space.

Figure 6.2 – Storage capacity usage

This tab also shows you Last updated date and time because the calculation of used storage takes time. If you press the Refresh button, you will be notified that calculation can take a long time. In fact, it performs in the background and you need to reopen the Capacity tab later to see the updated numbers.

Figure 6.3 – Refresh storage capacity...

Storage usage by environment

At the end of the Capacity tab, you can find a very important thing for storage analysis – Storage usage by environment. It allows you to see the total environment's database usage and details about the environment's tables. You can see which tables are the biggest and think about this data: do you really need this data, or can you archive or even delete it?

Figure 6.6 – Storage usage by environment

The Storage usage by environment tab has a simple structure. Just the most important information about your environments is included:

• Name
• Type
• Country/region

The most interesting parts are these:

• Database usage
• Storage per table

If you click on the List of tables link at the end of each environment's line, it will open a Table Information page in the selected Business Central environment. You will also be able to open it directly from the web client and not open...

Some practical advice on how to keep your data within limits

In Business Central, you have a special tool to manage your data – Data Administration. You can open this page by clicking on the Data Administration action on the Table Information page or just open it directly from Tell me.

Figure 6.8 – The Data Administration tool

After the first opening, it will be empty and you need to click on the Refresh action to update the data. It takes some time and runs in the background. For frequent usage of Data Administration, click on Actions and then Schedule Background Refresh.

Figure 6.9 – Schedule background refresh

You will get a confirmation message:

Figure 6.10 – Scheduled task creation confirmation

The new Job Queue Category and Entry will be created for scheduled information updates. You need not wait for data updates anymore while opening the Data Administration page. Open the...

Big customers

At the beginning of this section, I want to say that the numbers mentioned ahead are not limits for Business Central SaaS. The environment could operate using these numbers, but from my point of view, if you reach them, it will be better to have on-premises Business Central.

I did not pull these numbers out of thin air – they were presented at a Microsoft session about large customers at the Directions EMEA 2021 conference. These numbers are true at least for the years 2021-2022 and could change in the future.

So, you are a big customer if your single environment meets one of the following conditions:

• You have 1,000 records in the Users table.
• You have 800,000 records in the Sales Invoice Header table.
• You have 17 million records in the G/L Entry table.
• Your database is more than 400 GB.
• You migrate more than 160 GB from on-premises environments.
• Your users perform more than 82,000 interactions in the browser per hour.
• Your...

Summary

You have finished this chapter and with that, you now know your tenant capacity. You know how many environments you can have and how much storage you can have. You know how to keep your data within limits and how to delete and compress data. If you need to deploy Business Central, you can evaluate your environment and think about environment installation types. Now we can move on to learn how to automate administration processes using the Admin Portal APIs.