Admin Best Practices for Business Central

While Business Central is a SaaS solution, there are a number of activities that you should undertake to ensure that this powerful system remains current and helpful. This starts with the identification of a system administrator. Understanding how to use the different tools can be beneficial to efficiently monitor and maintain BC.

Business Central Admin Center

This area is only accessible to administrators, so roles may need to be assigned in Entra ID to provide access. Here you can manage your environments, control access via security groups, set up telemetry, and perform several other environment-specific tasks.

Within an environment, you can:

1. Check and update Apps
2. Check what Sessions are active and cancel them
3. Restart your environment
4. Export your database
5. Initiate a support request and report an outage
6. Set your update window
7. Copy the environment (typically to a new sandbox)
8. Restore the environment to a previous point in time
9. Rename the environment
10. Delete the environment

You should set up Notification Recipients that will receive update notifications, including when updates are scheduled and whether they have succeeded or failed.

Additionally, you can get status updates from Telemetry, Reported Outages, Operations, and Capacity. Capacity is important to periodically check, since it is possible to run out of capacity. In this area, you can determine what your usage is by environment and down to the table level. It is possible that something incorrectly configured, like the Change Log, can result in a huge number of records that consume most — or all — of your available capacity.

Managing Updates

You have three streams of updates to manage: Microsoft, AppSource Apps, and PTEs (per tenant extensions). You need to schedule your Microsoft updates; if you don’t, Microsoft will eventually force the update on its schedule. Using the “Apps” option within an environment, you can trigger either an immediate update or schedule it with the next BC update. Finally, PTEs are managed through Extension Management within BC, and new versions must be uploaded.

Telemetry

Microsoft has updated BC to emit, when configured, operational data to Azure. This data can then be displayed using a Power BI app. The Power BI app enables you to monitor various aspects of BC, including Administration, Error, Performance, and Usage. This is a great tool to provide an overview of your system and how your users are using it.

AppSource

AppSource is a “store” where you can find Business Central apps. There are more than 7,400 apps today. These can be used to address functional gaps. You need to be very careful when evaluating an app to ensure that you understand the related costs, level of support from the publisher (or the partner), what is the reputation of the publisher, when it was last updated, and what the legal commitments are. In other words, you need to complete your due diligence. Also, you need to test the app in your Sandbox before deploying it into production.

Testing

Testing changes need to be completed in your Sandbox before they are deployed to your production environment. A fresh copy of production is often a great place to start testing. This also provides you with an environment where you can break things and not affect daily operations.

Licensing

You need to be aware of your licensing since you can adjust your licenses down at the end of your commitment period. Commitment periods vary across Monthly, Annual, and Triannual. You can add licenses on a prorated basis at any time, but you can only reduce your licenses at the end of your commitment period.

Conclusion

Take advantage of the tools available to monitor, manage, and control your Business Central environments. You can identify “busy” work, performance issues, and opportunities for improvement.

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