Monitoring and Analyzing Telemetry

APPLIES TO: Business Central 2019 release wave 2 and later

Business Central emits telemetry data for various activities and operations on tenants and extensions. Whether running Business Central Online or On-premises, you can set up your tenants to send telemetry to Application Insights. Application Insights is a service hosted within Azure that gathers telemetry data for analysis and presentation. For more information, see What is Application Insights?. Monitoring telemetry gives you a look at the activities and general health of your tenants. It helps you diagnose problems and analyze operations that affect performance.

Tenant-level and extension-level telemetry

Application Insights can be enabled on two different levels: tenant and extension. When enabled on the tenant, either for a Business Central online tenant or on-premises Business Central Server instance, telemetry is emitted to a single Application Insights resource for gathering data on tenant-wide operations.

With Business Central 2020 release wave 2 and later, Application Insights can also be enabled on a per-extension basis. An Application Insights key is set in the extension's manifest (app.json file). At runtime, certain events related to the extension are emitted to the Application Insights resource. This feature targets publishers of per-tenant extensions to give them insight into issues in their extension before partners and customers report them.

Available telemetry

In Application Insights, telemetry from Business Central is logged as traces. Currently, Business Central offers telemetry on the following operations:

Area Description Online On-premises Extension support More information
App key vault secrets Provides information about the retrieval of secrets from Azure Key Vaults by extensions. check mark for feature[1] check mark for feature[1] check mark for feature See...
Authorization Provides information about user sign-in attempts. Information includes success or failure indication, reason for failure, user type, and more. check mark for feature See...
Company lifecycle Provides information about creating, copying, and deleting of companies. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Configuration package lifecycle Provides information about operations done on configuration packages, including exporting, importing, applying, and deleting. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Database lock timeouts Provides information about database locks that have timed out. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Email Provides information about the success or failure of sending emails. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Extension lifecycle [2] Provides information about the success or failure of extension-related operations, like publishing, synchronizing, installing, and more. check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Extension update Provides information about errors that occur when upgrading an extension. check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Field monitoring trace Provides information about the usage of the field monitoring feature. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Job queue Provides information about creating and running job queue entries. check mark for feature See...
Long running AL method trace Provides information about long running AL methods. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Long running operation (SQL query) Provides information about SQL queries that take longer than expected to execute. check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Page views Provides information about the pages that users open in the modern client. check mark for feature See...
Permissions Provides information about adding, removing, and assigning permission sets. check mark for feature See...
Report generation Provides information about the execution of reports. check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Incoming web service requests Provides information about the execution time of incoming web service requests. check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Outgoing web service requests Provides information about the execution time of outgoing web service requests. check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature See...
Web service access key authentication Provides information about the authentication of web server access keys on web service requests. check mark for feature check mark for feature See...

1This signal is only emitted to the Application Insights resource that's specified in the extension.

2Introduced in Business Central 2020 release wave 1, version 16.3. For extension telemetry, this signal was introduced in 2020 release wave 2, version 17.1.

Enabling Application Insights

Sending telemetry data to Application Insights requires you have an Application Insights resource in Azure. Once you have the Application Insights resource, you can start to configure your tenants and extensions to send telemetry data to your Application Insights resource. The configuration is different for Online and On-premises:

Viewing telemetry data in Application Insights

Telemetry from Business Central is stored in Azure Monitor Logs in the traces table. You can view collected data by writing log queries. Log queries are written in the Kusto query language (KQL). For more information, see Logs in Azure Monitor and Overview of log queries in Azure Monitor.

As a simple example, do the following steps:

  1. In the Azure portal, open your Application Insights resource.

  2. In the Monitoring menu, select Logs.

  3. On the New Query tab, type the following to get the last 100 traces:

    traces
| take 100
| sort by timestamp desc

About Custom Dimensions

Each trace includes a customDimensions column. The customDimensions column, in turn, includes a set dimensions that contain metrics specific to the trace. Each of these custom dimensions has a limit of 8000 characters. If a dimension's value exceeds 8000 characters, additional dimensions will be added to the trace for containing the excess characters. There can be up to two additional parameters, each with a maximum 8000 characters. The additional dimensions will have the names that <custom_dimension_name>_1 and <custom_dimension_name>_2, where <custom_dimension_name> is the name of the original dimension. For example, if the custom dimension is extensionCompilationDependencyList, then the additional dimensions would be extensionCompilationDependencyList_1 and extensionCompilationDependencyList_2.

Note

The 8000 character limit is governed by the Application Insights API.

Application Insights sample code

On the Business Central BCTech repository on GitHub, samples of KQL code are available to make it easy to get started using Application Insights.

For more information, see Business Central BCTech repository on GitHub.

See also

Telemetry Event IDs
Working with Administration Tools
The Business Central Administration Center
Managing Environments
Managing Tenant Notifications
Introduction to automation APIs
LogMessage Method