System monitoring and diagnostics for Commerce in-store components

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Commerce. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Enabled for Public preview General availability
Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically Sep 3, 2021 To be announced

Business value

Access to system diagnostic logs allows better visibility for IT administrators and enables improved time to detection, time to mitigation, and time to resolution of live-site incidents. IT administrators are able to determine key contributing factors of incidents, which allows for targeted engagement with Microsoft support teams, or with implementation partners, ISVs, or other stakeholders.

System health visibility also allows IT administrators to provide more informed support to their users. For instance, when fielding a support call from a cashier in a particular store, an IT administrator can easily pinpoint when exactly the issue occurred, whether the issue was caused by an extension, and whether the issue is widespread or limited to specific stores or e-commerce channels. In addition, the IT administrator can determine issue resolution as soon as the issue is resolved. IT administrators can also configure alerts for specific system health conditions to be proactively notified.

This specific feature enables health diagnostics of in-store components as well as correlation of diagnostic events between in-store and cloud-hosted components, for detailed traceability of issues through the system. In addition, events from in-store components enable centralized access for IT administrators to diagnostic events across hundreds or even thousands of store locations.

Feature details

This feature enables access to diagnostic logs for in-store components, including:

  • Point of sale (POS)
  • Hardware Station (embedded within POS)
  • Hardware Station (standalone)
  • Commerce runtime (embedded within POS)

System-generated event details include POS operation invocations, page views, exceptions, Commerce runtime and Hardware Station API executions, success/failure result, API execution latency, publisher (to help attribute issues to Microsoft-authored code paths or to specific extensions), among others. Dependency executions to channel database as well as Commerce headquarters are also available.

IT administrators can author custom queries in Application Insights to filter across a wide range of criteria including activity ID, timestamp, channel ID, POS device ID (if applicable), app session, and user session ID. IT administrators can share these specific identifiers with Microsoft support for improved communication and collaboration, and improved mitigation and resolution times.

For proactive monitoring, IT administrators can configure custom alerts based on specified query result thresholds using Azure Monitor.