D365FO Telemetry Data FAQs

Alex MeyerFinance & Operations4 hours ago4 Views

After writing about this topic in the past I’ve had a number of questions surrounding some of the more detailed parts of telemetry within D365FO. I wanted to create a blog where I could answer some of these questions and answer new ones as they come up!

Does enabling telemetry impact performance within D365FO?

This is probably the most asked question I get surrounding telemetry. The most vital thing to keep in mind about this is that the Azure Monitor (which is the merging of Application Insights and Log Analytics offerings) integration with D365FO is using an asynchronous architecture. This is considered best practice and is standard across most logging scenarios. This means that a command to track a particular event is sent to Azure Monitor there is no expectation for the code to wait for a response (you can think of this as a ‘send it and forget it’ configuration). This results in a minimal impact to the main system performance.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft has had similar telemetry data enabled for quite some time, if you’ve ever opened a support case or went through a licensing renewal you know that Microsoft will sometimes refer to their ‘internal telemetry’ during the engagement. This means that telemetry functionality has actually been enabled and being used in D365FO for quite some time so any ‘performance hit’ would have been felt by users a long time ago.

To help prove this, we can actually test and see what the impact of creating a custom telemetry event and measure how much time it adds to the overall process. I’m going to reuse a custom event I have created in the past and test the time it takes to execute.

In this case, we can verify that the time it takes to execute the ‘TrackEvent’ step (which is the step that actually sends the data to Azure Monitor) is 1 ms.

How does telemetry differ from a change tracking / audit trail solution?

Telemetry data at its core is designed to give you ‘usage data’ about the system, of course you can extend this into other areas but this is its main focus. If we compare that to an audit trail solution which is designed to track what a user actually changes within a system you can see there is a slight difference.

An example would be that telemetry data will show you that the user went to the vendors form but an audit trail solution will show if a user created / modified a vendor and the old and new values of any changes.

What events can telemetry data track?

Within D365FO, you can track the following events:

Form runs (Page Views) – when a user navigates to a form/page within D365FO
User Sessions – when a user logs in to D365FO
X++ Exceptions (Failures) – when an error occurs within D365FO
DMF Errors – when an error occurs within the data management framework
Warehouse events – actions taken within the warehouse module and mobile app
Custom traces / metrics – Custom telemetry events created by end users

You have the option to choose which telemetry event types you would like track.

What is the cost of storing telemetry data in Azure Monitor?

App Insights and Log Analytics fall under the larger Azure Monitor resource type. There are different tiers available with differing costs depending on what region you want the resource created in. I will use East US as my example region for the below, these screenshots are from the Microsoft Azure Monitor Pricing page.

Azure Monitor Logs Overview

Azure Monitor Pricing

How long is telemetry data stored for?

The default retention policy for the Basic or Auxiliary tiers is 30 days, for the Analytics Log tier it is 90 days. This can be increased at the workspace or table level via Azure Portal or PowerShell.

Manage Data Retention in a Log Analytics Workspace