In the cloud world, advisors, partners, and customer implementation teams need to leverage all the available data in LCS to monitor and diagnose an environment. Telemetry data is the basis of monitoring and diagnostics in LCS.

Support analytics comprises three information tenets – monitoring, diagnostics, and analytics. Let's take a look at these now:

• Monitoring: Microsoft supports two types of monitoring to view the health of an environment through LCS via availability and health monitoring. These are as follows:
  • Availability monitoring: This type of monitoring performs a check against the environment to make sure that it's available at all times. If the check fails, the Microsoft service engineering team is immediately notified:

The various charts in the preceding screenshot are for index analysis on SQL Azure for a production environment. The Index usage view shows the most expensive indices on the environment based on seeks versus scans, along with tables with the highest row count. Also, you can gather information about the state and run on SQL Azure, as well as performance metrics.

The SQL NOW feature allows us to troubleshoot SQL Azure issues in real time by looking into which queries are blocked and which queries are blocking them. It also provides a view of tables that have locks on them.

• • Health monitoring: In addition to availability checks, some basic health checks must be performed. These basic health checks include CPU level, memory consumption of the virtual machines (VMs), and the total number of deadlocks in a five minute period. Microsoft Telemetry Infrastructure collects health metrics from the environments, and if a metric crosses a threshold value, the Microsoft service engineering team is alerted so that the issue can be investigated.

• Diagnostics: Telemetry data helps build a storyboard view that shows what that user and other users were doing when the issue was reported. In addition to user activity tracking, a rich set of SQL data is also available for performance troubleshooting using SQL NOW:

As shown in the preceding screenshot, Environment monitoring gives you information about the state spanning user load, activity load, SQL, server utilization, and so on that's been spread across a configurable time scale.

• Analytics: Analytics is another critical use case for the telemetry data that is collected. Currently, only Microsoft can perform analytics so that it can gauge and understand feature usage and performance through Microsoft Power BI.

For Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition, Microsoft is responsible for actively monitoring the health of production environments at all times as it is a managed cloud service.