This book keeps all the needed information in one place. It contains detailed information about the Admin portal and cloud migration process extended with a real usage experience. The book will guide you from basic operations to advanced automation processes, from a few clicks in web interface to scripts writing.
The first part of the book will help all Dynamics 365 Business Central users to be deeply integrated into the administration processes. Beginners will learn the basic things; experienced users will be interested in a telemetry setup and analysis and processes automation. The second part of this book mainly caters to Dynamics 365 Business Central developers and consultants who are planning to move their on-premises solution to the cloud.
Chapter 1, Overview of the Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin Center, contains common information about how to start your work with Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin Center and get access if you cannot open it. In addition, you will get details about environment types, limits, and planning of your free space.
Chapter 2, Managing Business Central Environments, is about managing your Business Central environments, their types, statuses, updates information, and the creation of new environments. In addition, it contains information about how to create a copy of your production environment and test your apps with future releases.
Chapter 3, Environment Details and Notification Setup, contains detailed information about your environment, versions management, apps and sessions, database management, backup and restore.
Chapter 4, Telemetry Setup and Analysis, explains how production environment debugging is quite tricky when your Business Central is SaaS. Telemetry will help you with that. In this chapter, you will learn how to check basic telemetry on the Admin portal and how to set up extended telemetry with App Insights.
Chapter 5, Reported Outages and Operations, helps you to get details about reported outages and monitor your app's operations. Here, you will learn how to report an outage, search your reported outages, and list your installed apps without opening your Business Central environments.
Chapter 6, Tenant Capacity Management, looks at how SaaS environments have some capacity limitations. Learn how to get details about your database's capacity, environment limits, most massive data entities, and how to keep your data within limits. In addition, we will learn what Microsoft determines as a "Big Customer" for which it could be better to use an on-premises environment.
Chapter 7, Admin Center API, explores ways you could perform almost all actions we listed before without opening the Admin Center. We can use the Admin Center API for that. You can automate routine tasks with scripts. Create and delete environments, schedule updates, and set up notifications – all these operations could be run with a few clicks by calling the APIs.
Chapter 8, Cloud Migration Schema and Limitations, teaches you when you would want to use cloud migration, functions of the cloud migration tool, ways of usage, work schema, and main nodes.
Chapter 9, Cloud Migration Setup, provides step-by-step instructions that help you to set up your cloud migration.
Chapter 10, Migration Process, teaches you what to do when you successfully complete your migration setup. Learn how to run the migration process in two steps, how to check migration results by tables, and what to do when your migration fails.
Chapter 11, The Real Migration Experience, explains how, with our customer, we decided to use cloud migration for data replication just when it appeared and strict limitations were removed. Here is our project's story, which could be useful for you.
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/GUFuQ.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "After you press Sign In, you should see that your script executed without errors and access token keeps in the $Token variable."
A block of code is set as follows:
$response = Invoke-WebRequest `
-Method Get `
-Uri https://api.businesscentral.dynamics.com/admin/v2.11/applications/environments `
-Headers @{Authorization=("Bearer $Token")}
Write-Host (ConvertTo-Json (ConvertFrom-Json $response.Content))
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Now, we need to provide permissions to your app registration. Click on the API permissions tab and then select + Add a permission."
Tips or Important Notes
Appear like this.
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at customercare@packtpub.com and mention the book title in the subject of your message.
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.
Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at copyright@packt.com with a link to the material.
If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.
© 2022 Packt Publishing Limited All Rights Reserved
