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Manage Tenant-Specific Notifications

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Note

Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra ID. Learn more

You can get notified of administrative events that occur on environments in a Business Central online tenant. For example, we send notifications when a major update is available for environments, when an environment update has succeeded or failed, or when extensions require changes to be compatible with an upcoming update. When these and other similar events occur on the tenant, an email is sent to the notification recipients for the tenant.

Note

If a prospect has signed up for a trial of Business Central, make sure that they understand that they must sign up for notifications. This is especially important if the prospect moves to My Company so that the tenant will expire after 30 days. For more information, see Dynamics 365 Business Central Trials and Subscriptions in the business functionality content for Business Central.

Communication channels

Environment lifecycle events are communicated through various channels, each with their own benefits.

Email notification

Notifications are sent to all email addresses that are listed in the Notification recipients list of the Business Central administration center. Manage the list manually by adding and removing recipients to ensure the right individuals are notified of the event.

Note

It is important that at least one administrator's email address has been entered as a notification recipient to ensure proper awareness of events requiring administrative attention.

Important

To not miss update notifications from Microsoft, you must verify that the emails are not redirected to a spam folder by your email software. The notifications are sent from the Microsoft account, no-reply-dynamics365@microsoft.com.

Microsoft 365 Message Center

Most environment lifecycle events that emails are sent for will soon also be posted to Microsoft 365 Message Center. Over time, emails that are sent to the specified notification recipients will be a subset of the messages that are posted in Message Center. Eventually, emails sent to notification recipients will be deprecated.

Already now, we warmly recommend that you make sure that the relevant people sign up to receive email notifications from the Message center. For more information, see the article Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin content.

If you're a delegated admin, you might not be able to sign up yourself. In those cases, ask the internal admin to add you or a group email account as recipients. Also, in some scenarios where your organization manages multiple tenants, you might want to use the service communications API in Microsoft Graph to access the health status and message center posts about Business Central. For more information, see Access service health and communications in Microsoft Graph.

Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard

Both as an internal admin and as a delegated admin, you can help users determine the cause of their problems in different ways before you have to escalate the issue to Microsoft Support. The starting point is the Business Central administration center where you can access telemetry for the tenant and check the status of already reported outages. For more information, see Managing Production and Sandbox Environments in the Admin Center.

The Microsoft 365 admin center provides an overview of service health across Microsoft services. Select Preferences to receive service health email notifications about incidents across Business Central, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft services. For more information, see How to check service health. If you manage more than one tenant, see View service health for all accounts.

As a partner, use the Partner Center to get an overview of service health for each customer. For more information, see Check service health for a customer in the Partner Center content. You can also use APIs for automated service notifications for Azure Insights & Office 365 service communications.

Telemetry in Application Insights

Application Insights telemetry includes the most complete list of Environment Lifecycle events, and can better be used for automation and reporting purposes than the other communication channels.

Learn more about Environment Lifecycle trace telemetry here.

Customize notifications and automation

Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate have built-in connectors to query telemetry in Application Insights that you can use to set up custom notifications or to automate certain actions triggered by an environment lifecycle event.

Learn more about alerts on telemetry events here.

Example: Grouped notification for available updates

This Logic App runs every number of days (specified in deployment) and lists all updates made available to environments that emit telemetry to the specified Application Insights resource for the specified period. Administrators can use this to replace the many email notifications they would receive for each individual enviroment when set up as notification recipient.

Deploy to Azure

Example: Notification for deleted environment

This Logic App queries Application Insights every number of minutes (specified in deployment) and notifies a user (also specified in deployment) of any deleted environments in Microsoft Teams. The action that sends the notification in Teams can be updated to notify a Channel or Group Chat instead.

Deploy to Azure

Example: Take action on failed environment updates

This Logic App runs a query that returns any failed environment updates ever number of hours (specified in deployment). Customize the Logic App after deploying to action the failed update, for example by opening a case in Dynamics 365 Customer Service using the Dataverse connector.

Deploy to Azure

Example: Post adaptive cards in Teams for each available environment update

This Logic App queries Application Insights every number of minutes (specified in the deployment) and posts an adaptive card to a specified Microsoft Teams channel for each environment that has an update available. Based on the user's choice, the Logic App will call the Business Central admin center API using an authorized service-to-service Microsoft Entra app (configuration details specified in the deployment). The adaptive card gives the user four choices:

  • Schedule the update as soon as possible ("Run Now"), and allow the update to start outside of the update window for the environment
  • Reschedule the update to a specified other day
  • Ignore information about the update and close the card
  • Open the admin center

Deploy to Azure

Example: Post adaptive cards in Teams for user permission errors

This Logic App queries Application Insights every number of minutes (specified in the deployment) and posts adaptive cards to a specified Microsoft Teams channel for each permission error users in environments emitting telemetry to the specified Application Insights resource have encountered. Using the adaptive card, administrators can open Business Central to assign the needed permissions to the user.

Deploy to Azure

Reporting

To help you analyze Business Central telemetry, find the Power BI app in Microsoft AppSource. This app includes an Administration report which shows an inventory of environments including various environment operations details built with the environment lifecycle telemetry in Application Insights. Learn more here, or get it immediately from Microsoft AppSource.

Note

The Power BI reports and dataset that make up this app are available on the Business Central BCTech repository on GitHub. You can customize those resources for your own needs and publish from Power BI desktop.

Admin center operations page

The operations page does not notify you of environment lifecycle events, but does provide some details on these operations that are not available in other channels, like the email address of the user that executed an operation. Learn more here.

Overview of communication channels

The following table illustrates how we communicate about the different environment lifecycle events and other communication scenarios on the different channels.

- Application Insights Email Notification Microsoft 365 Message Center[1] Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard Tenant Admin Center Operations Page
Environment Created check mark for feature
Update Available check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature
Update Scheduled check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature
Updates Postponed/Resumed check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature
Update Started check mark for feature check mark for feature
Update Succeeded/Failed[2] check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature check mark for feature
Environment Hotfix check mark for feature
Environment Restart check mark for feature check mark for feature
Environment Started/Stopped check mark for feature
Environment Copy check mark for feature check mark for feature
Environment Restore check mark for feature check mark for feature
Environment Microsoft Entra tenant Move check mark for feature check mark for feature
Cancel Session check mark for feature
Database Export check mark for feature Export History Page
Environment Setting Change [3] check mark for feature check mark for feature
Environment Deleted check mark for feature check mark for feature
Environment Renamed check mark for feature check mark for feature
AppSource App Install/Update Scheduling check mark for feature check mark for feature
AppSource App/PTE Install/Update check mark for feature check mark for feature
AppSource App Uninstall Scheduling check mark for feature
AppSource App/PTE Uninstall check mark for feature check mark for feature
AppSource App/PTE Dependency Install & Update Orchestration check mark for feature
Installed PTE incompatible with next version check mark for feature check mark for feature
Service Incidents and Advisories check mark for feature
Feature Change and Deprecation Announcements check mark for feature

1Messages for environment lifecycle events are coming to Microsoft 365 Message Center soon.

2Application Insights and Operations page include full failure details, email notification and Message Center cover fewer failure reasons but include mitigation steps.

3Examples of setting changes include changes to the environment update window, assigned security groups, and Application Insights settings.

Notification of blocked updates

Microsoft updates environments according to the update windows that are defined for the environment in the Business Central administration center. However, if the environment includes an app that isn't compatible with the next version, Microsoft pauses the update and sends a notification of the issue.

After a while, all users see an in-product notification, which may confuse some people. But Microsoft wants to update the environment, so an admin must disable and remove the problematic app so that the update can continue. After more than a month of waiting, Microsoft sends a more strongly worded notification. If the environment is still blocked from getting the update after more than 4-5 months, Microsoft uninstalls the problematic app, but doesn't delete any data. The environment is updated with the latest security and other updates.

The following list illustrates a typical timeline:

  • 10 weeks of emails sent to the registered notification recipients.

    If the update fails, Microsoft reschedules automatically. The notification recipients will receive multiple emails. If no notification recipient has been set up, then no email is sent.

  • Six weeks with in-product notifications that encourage users to contact their admin.

    This notification currently indicates that the environment will expire to worry users so they try to find their admin to sort out things.

  • One month of more explicit in-product notifications

    This notification currently indicates that the environment is missing an important update and is blocked. The wording has been chosen to make it clearer what the issue is and what the user must do as quickly as possible.

If the problematic app hasn't been uninstalled at this point, Microsoft typically starts the process of force-uninstalling apps, including per-tenant extensions. Data isn't deleted.

For more information about updates, see Major Updates and Minor Updates for Business Central Online. For more information about how to keep your Business Central compliant with upcoming updates, see Maintain AppSource Apps and Per-Tenant Extensions in Business Central Online.

Cleaning up settings

If you end the relationship with a customer where you have set up your email address as a notification recipient, you must remove the email address while you still have access to that customer's Business Central administration center.

See also

Managing Updates in the Business Central Admin Center
The Business Central Administration Center
Managing Environments
Introduction to automation APIs
Working with Administration Tools