Application Insights for Business Central Usage - Cheat Sheet

1. Create a new Application Insights App in Azure

2. Copy the full Connection String to the Clipboard

Step 1: Create new application insights in Azure

3. Go to Partner Center->Customers->Customer List and pick a customer.

4. That brings you to the Service Management page, where you click on “Dynamics 365 Business Central to Administer Services for that customer.

adding Dynamics 365 business central to your administer services

5. In that customer’s Production Environment for Business Central, paste in the Application Insights Connection String that you had copied to your Clipboard.

Copy string from Azure and paste it in Application Insights in Business Central

6. Go back to your Azure Portal and copy the Application ID of your Application Insights App. That Application ID is found under the Application Insights App->Configure->API Access.

Where to find your Application ID to paste into Power BI

7. Go to your Power BI (Pro) Service. Choose Apps from the navigation pane and click “Get Apps”.

8. Type “Business Central Usage” in the Search Box. You will see the Dynamics 365 Business Central Usage Analytics App to download.

In Power BI apps search for Dynamics 365 Business Central

9. Get it Now!

Click Get it now button to download Dynamics 365 Business Central

10. Follow on-screen instructions to Install or Update.

If App is already installed it sill show update app

11. Once the App downloads it will only see the Contoso data until you connect to your clients’ Environments.

Connect client environments to see their data

12. Accept Oauth2 as the Authentication Method and click “Sign in and connect” with your AAD login/password/MFA.

Log in to connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central

13. Sign in with your Azure Active Directory account.

14. Once you are authenticated, you will need to specify the Application Insights Application ID to connect to your clients’ data. Paste that ID in and specify a “Lookback period”.

Paste your application insights ID to connect to your clients' data

15. The data takes a few minutes to load, depending on how many clients you connected with the App Insights Connection String and how far to look back.

Load speeds vary depending on how far back you are pulling data

16. Various categories of data are listed on the left navigation pane. I chose Error Dialogs. In particular, I noticed 23 errors for one client in “Bin Content”. 17 of those errors refer to a system job trying remove items from “non-existent” Bin Locations. This was enough information to go into the system and debug the errors.