Dynamics 365 Business Central: what I want for Santa is…

Often when approaching the end of the year we love to contact our Dynamics 365 Business Central customers and asking them to provide responses to a quick survey. On my blog you can find some of these results for the past years if you’re interested.

This year we’ve done only a single and very simple question: if you can talk with Santa , what do you like to have in Business Central for your Christmas present?

We left the question completely open-ended. No set of predefined answers to choose from, but the customer could freely write what he would like to find under the Christmas tree .
As is done in physics, where during the analysis of an event the background noises are discarded (so the answer “I would like Business Central to do the work for me while I’m doing shopping on Amazon” is not reported in the final list), we considered the answers with the highest % of preferences.
And here are the results:

DISCLAIMER: these results in no way represent the wishes of every BC customers worldwide, but are limited to a subset of customers.

Seeing the final results, my first and immediate reaction was: end customers have their feet on the ground and want to see everyday things work well.

In this list, you can see lots of practical aspects that are part of the every day business, like performance, posting process, storage cost, MRP, warehouse etc. For example, AI features were selected only with a final 2% of preferences and who mentioned AI mentioned also “more useful AI features”. And I honestly love this…

Not to be misunderstood: I absolutely love futuristic things like AI, but I’m also aware that in the ERP world there are definitely other priorities. AI in ERP is the future (and I’m personally working a lot on that) and it is right to make investments in this sense, but perhaps the scale of priorities in the real world is different…

And what about me?

What about my “BC Santa wishes”? Yes, I also have a wish that I would like to find under the Christmas tree: the Business Central Premium tier.

I talked a lot in the past about how Dynamics 365 Business Central handles scalability and the Premium Tier is always on top of my dreams.

To avoid repeating too much myself, remember that a Dynamics 365 Business Central database is considered overloaded if CPU, Data I/O and Log Write metrics on the VMs in the compute tier have high values.

If a database has been consistently overloaded within the last half hour, Microsoft automatically adds more capacity to it (scale up).

The scale up of a database is only applied to paid production environments and it’s an automatic process. Scaling rules are the following:

• The database is scaled up when in the last 30 minutes CPU, Data IO, or Log Write have been high for a total of 15+ minutes.
• The database is instead scaled down when (all) the database wasn’t scaled up in the last 45 days and in the last 7 days the values of CPU, Data I/O, and Log Write have been very low.

With these scaling rules, your Dynamics 365 Business Central database can start with an S0 level (level names here are just for an example) and then it can be moved to S1 or S2 if the database load is big in the next 30 minute window (accordingly to the above rules). But then it can be scaled down to S0 again and an heavy process (that maybe runs for 10 minutes) will be executed on this low-level tier because maybe the scale up is not thrown (above rules are not satisfied).

To clearly explain to Santa my dream: I would like to have a Business Central Premium Tier, where a customer can agree on a fixed guaranteed lowest level of performances and it cannot be scaled down below this limit.

Just to provide a more clear example with numbers: I (as a customer) want to pay an extra (monthly or yearly) amount of $$ to have my Business Central database never scaled down under the S1 performance tier. This means that my Business Central database will be scaled up to S2 or S3 during peaks, but when I’m not doing nothing it will be scaled down to S1 (and NEVER below this level). This will help many enterprises on having more predictable performances.

Is this costly for Microsoft? Yes! Having environments that cannot be scaled down to zero (ot to the lowest possible level) has a cost and an impact on the elastic pool infrastructure, but I think that benefits for the customers are a lot (and also revenues for Microsoft could be considerable if doing that).

Will all this remain a dream? Who knows… this year I’ve been pretty good during this year so asking is legitimate and dreaming isn’t a crime.

As a famous phrase says:

It’s not pretentious to dream big and it’s not even a sin. If anything, the real sin is surviving

But let’s leave the dreams floating in the air and move on to the wishes instead.
We are almost at the finish line for the year 2024. Over the course of this year I have been lucky enough to get in touch with many of you, both virtually and in person. Thanks as always for your support.

As every year, I take advantage of this post to leave you all my best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
We are a very strong community… see you soon with lots of new things coming. Happy 2025!

Original Post https://demiliani.com/2024/12/23/dynamics-365-business-central-what-i-want-for-santa-is/