Install and manage Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

This article explains how to access and use the installation management area for Customer Insights. In this one-stop experience, you can manage to install and uninstall the Customer Insights - Journeys and Customer Insights - Data applications.

All of your Dataverse environments are listed in the installation management area by type (Production or Trial). You can see where Customer Insights – Journeys and Customer Insights – Data are installed and take action to install or uninstall.

Prerequisites and requirements

To install Customer Insights, you must meet all the following requirements:

• You must already have a Microsoft 365 tenant.
• You must have Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, or Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Standalone license on your tenant.
• You must sign into your tenant with a user account that has all the following:
  • A security role (such as Global admin or Service support admin) that allows you to modify the target Dynamics 365 environment. (If you're reinstalling Customer Insights on an environment where Customer Insights was previously installed, then Service support admin users [Dynamics 365 administrator or Power Platform administrator] must use the same user ID as was used for the initial install. If you're not sure which ID was used for the initial install, or if you're getting errors, then try to install as a Global admin.)
  • Permissions to register applications in Azure. The global administrator always has this right, but other accounts can also have it. See Do I have permissions to register applications on Azure? for information about how to confirm this setting for your account.
  • A Dynamics 365 license with the System Administrator security role assigned on your target Dynamics 365 environment. (The Customer Insights license agreement doesn't legally require the installing user to have this license, but a known technical issue currently makes it necessary.)
• You must be located in a country/region where the product is supported. To read the latest list of countries/regions where you can use Customer Insights, download the Microsoft Dynamics 365 International Availability document (PDF).

Before starting an install, close all other browser windows and tabs and clear your browser cache. If you run into trouble while installing, see the Administration and setup FAQ for some possible solutions.

Important

Your system is constrained by certain limits and quotas that apply to the number of contacts you can market to, monthly email messages you can send, Litmus previews you can view, and more. Familiarize yourself with the terms and limits of the product before you begin to use it. The limits are different based on whether you're running a trial or subscribed version of the product.

• For subscribed (paid) versions, download the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide and visit the Fair use policy page.
• For trials, see Dynamics 365 Customer Insights limits for trials.

You can monitor your usage levels by going to Settings > Advanced settings > Other settings > Quota limits. More information: Quota limits

Add Customer Insights to your Microsoft 365 tenant

There are several ways to get a Customer Insights license. You can purchase it from the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights overview page, or by going to Billing > Purchase services in your Microsoft 365 admin center, or by contacting your Microsoft sales representative or channel partner. After you've purchased a license and it's added to your tenant, you’ll find it in the Power Platform Admin Center under Resources > Dynamics 365 apps.

You can have any number of Customer Insights licenses available on your tenant. Licenses translate to "apps" listed in the Power Platform Admin Center. Even old, expired trial licenses have records listed in the Power Platform Admin Center. You can access the installation management experience for any of these apps in the Power Platform Admin Center under Resources > Dynamics 365 apps. The app listing under Dynamics 365 apps is simply a means to access the management page. It shouldn't be considered as representing anything else.

Once a paid license has been applied to your tenant, it can take up to 24 hours to sync with the Dynamics 365 licensing system and be available for installation. To see your licenses in the Microsoft Admin Center, go to Your products. They won't show up under Licenses because they're tenant-level application licenses, not assignable seat-based licenses where you pay per user. Only pay-per-user, seat-based licenses are shown on the "Licenses" page.

To see your license in the Power Platform Admin Center, if you don't have a global tenant, you must select the geography that matches the home tenant geography on which the license was installed. For example, if the tenant home geo is Canada, you'll only see the license in the Power Platform Admin Center when you select Canada. To see the license in all geographies regardless of the tenant's home geography, support or a Microsoft product manager must convert your tenant to a multi-geo tenant.

Install, uninstall, or update Customer Insights

The following sections detail how to install, uninstall, or apply updates to the Customer Insights apps.

Install

There are two types of installations for Customer Insights - Journeys:

1. A paid installation or trial that includes the services and allows you to send messages, execute journeys, etc. You can install a paid license on an environment that has never had the Customer Insights - Journeys app installed.
2. A free, solutions only installation that only installs the solutions that include the front-end user experience application components but none of the services. With a solutions-only installation, you can test user experience solution customizations but you can't execute any service-related functionality in the application. Solutions-only installations get solution upgrades every month with the regular releases. If you convert the solutions-only environment to a paid environment by installing the services, the outbound marketing user experience is hidden. You must go to the Settings > Versions page to re-enable the outbound marketing user experience if you were building customizations on it in the solutions-only mode.

If you uninstall Customer Insights - Journeys paid or trial, the services are disconnected and the environment converts to a solutions-only installation state. When the services have been uninstalled by you or by the system due to license expirations, you'll see a banner at the top of the application indicating that the environment only has the user experience solutions installed but not the services.

Note

If you own the legacy Dynamics 365 Marketing license, the application installation entitlement from that business model applies, which allows one application installation per license purchased. If you own the current Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license, you're entitled to install the Customer Insights - Journeys and Customer Insights - Data applications each four times on your existing Dataverse environments. If you've signed up for a trial, you'll also see a listing for the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license and you can launch the installation management page.

Set up or access a Customer Insights - Journeys environment

1. If you haven't installed other Dynamics 365 apps on the Microsoft Power Platform admin center, go to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com to create an environment of the desired type (production, sandbox, or trial). Learn more: Create and manage environments in the Power Platform admin center.

2. On the admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com page, find Resources in the left-hand site map and select Dynamics 365 apps.

   • Whether you have the legacy, standalone Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing licenses (available to customers who purchased before September 2023) or the new, combined Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license that entitles you to install both the Customer Insights - Journeys and Customer Insights - Data applications, you can find your licenses listed on admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com under Resources > Dynamics 365 apps. Look for either Customer Insights or Marketing (either one will open the page). If you have the old, standalone Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license and don't see it listed, go to the trial overview page and start a free trial to generate the license and then search for Marketing in the list to open the page.

3. Find either Customer Insights or Marketing then, to open the installation management area, select the three dots dropdown ("...") next to the app name and select Manage.

4. In the installation management area, you'll see your available environments listed and can choose where you want to install Customer Insights - Journeys or Customer Insights - Data.

   

5. After you've installed the Customer Insights - Journeys and Customer Insights - Data apps on the same environment, you need to finish connecting them. To connect the apps, go to Customer Insights - Journeys then go to Settings > Data Management > Customer Insights and select the Connect button. This completes the data sync for segmentation between the two applications.

6. To clear this connection if you need to uninstall and reinstall Customer Insights - Data with a new instance ID, after you have uninstalled Customer Insights - Data from the environment, go to the Power Apps Maker portal -> Tables and find the table called msdynmkt_configurations and set the CXPConfig row column name "Customer Insights Status" attribute to NotConfigured. This will reset the connection and allow you to click Connect again on the setting after you have reinstalled a new instance of Customer Insights - Data.

7. In Customer Insights - Data there are a few more steps to connect the Dataverse environment and start generating profiles based on the contact and lead entities in Dataverse, in addition to adding more data sources.

8. On the installation management page, select the circled i icon next to the "Installed" text to find a link to open the Customer Insights - Data environment. In Customer Insights - Data, go to Data > Data sources, select Add Data Source, and choose Dataverse. Populate the URL with the environment URL from the Customer Insights - Journeys Dataverse environment. Select the contact and lead tables only and then select Save. Learn more: Connect to Dataverse

9. In Unify, choose the contact with ContactId as the primary key and fields like email address and phone number in the deduplication rules and lead with LeadID as the primary key and fields like email address and phone number as deduplication rules from tables you ingested to add them to the profile and proceed with unification settings. Learn more: Data unification overview

Troubleshooting a failed installation

Installations can fail for many reasons unrelated to and undetectable by the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys application. When you request an installation, Microsoft decrements your application quota (in case you start multiple installations at a time) and requests the package installation from the platform. Once the platform tries to install the package, it can run into any number of issues in your specific environment including plugins that need to be disabled, dependencies in the Dataverse entity model that the journeys application relies on such as for leads or contacts, dependencies, security, or customizations.

If your installation fails, you'll see a Retry link where the Install link used to be. Before you Retry, you can do some checking on your environment to see if there's anything you need to do to prepare it to allow the solution installation.

• Select Learn More to receive directions on the installation failure and steps you can take to resolve it.
• You must have a paid license on the tenant.
• You must be the admin of the environment to install the application.
• You must disable any custom plug-ins before installing.
• If users own records in Dataverse and have left the company, those records may be locked and the installation is unable to write to them, for example, the DataLake folder which analytics must access. You must update the ownership of these records to an active user.
• Check your solutions using the solution checker to learn what failed. You may have customizations or plugins which need to be disabled. Learn more: Troubleshoot issues with Solution Health Hub
• You can go to the solutions history view in the Maker portal to see what failed and what actions you can take to prepare your environment for a successful install. Learn more: View the history of a solution

If your installation fails and you want to abandon the installation, you must achieve a successful installation so that you can run the uninstall process to free up the license and disconnect any services that may have succeeded during the parts of the installation process that didn't fail. If you still can't resolve the issue after attempting using the solution checker or visiting the solution history in the Maker portal, you should file a support ticket and get help to achieve a successful installation.

Uninstall

Find detailed guidance for uninstalling Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys.

Update

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys releases updates on a monthly basis with new features and fixes. When there's a new release available, you can see it in Settings > Versions. Select Manage+Update to launch the installation management page. Environments listed under Production have an Update link. For trials, choose use the legacy installation experience to update them.

Maintain or update your installation

In addition to helping you install Customer Insights for the first time, you can access the installation management area to modify, maintain, or update your installation. You can do all of the following:

• Check for and apply updates
• Fix installation issues
• Connect a disconnected instance to marketing services
• Clean up after a copy or restore operation
• Uninstall Customer Insights - Journeys

Privacy notice

For information about how Microsoft processes personal data, please refer to the Microsoft Privacy Statement.

For information about where your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys data is stored, please refer to the Trust Center.

Microsoft Azure services

Customer Insights - Journeys leverages certain Microsoft Azure services. Enabling Customer Insights - Journeys allows your data to flow to the Azure services to perform some of the marketing processes.

For more information about Azure service offerings, see the Azure Trust Center.

Custom schema and display names

Custom schema and display names for fields, entities, relations, attributes, and other elements in Customer Insights - Journeys may be referenced by other object definitions, and can also get shared through various other channels that are outside your designated geographic location (geo) as described in the Trust Center and the Microsoft Online Services Terms. However, the data entered for these elements will not be transferred outside your geo.

For example, you could use the customization capabilities of Customer Insights - Journeys to create a new entity that includes a new field, as shown in the following table. In this case, the texts shown in the Schema name and Display name columns could be referenced by other object definitions and could also be shared through various other channels that are outside your geo. However, field values for specific records (as shown in the Value column) will remain within your geo.

Type	Schema name	Display name	Value
New entity	Solution1_promotion	Promotion	(n/a)
New field	Solution1_Promtion.name	Name	Spring 2019 Promotion

Important

Do not enter information for your custom schema and/or display name that you do not want stored outside your geo.

Other examples of when you take responsibility for data flows

On your command, the following actions take customer content out of Customer Insights - Journeys and you are responsible for where the data is directed and stored (including outside your geo location):

• When you send email with customer content
• When you use submissions forms and allow prefilling with customer content that will be displayed in the forms
• When you configure marketing analytics connectors to copy interaction data to your own Azure storage
• When you configure additional extension mechanics

For more information on data that will flow out of the Customer Insights - Journeys system and your geo, please refer to the Trust Center as well as the product documentation for the specific Customer Insights - Journeys offering.

Collecting feedback data

As a way to refine and improve the experience, Microsoft may collect feedback data from users within the app. Administrators can disable survey feedback with a PowerShell command by turning the “disableSurveyFeedback” flag to true. See list of tenant settings for more detail.