How can I tell if my D365 environment is Tier 1 or Tier 2?

As a functional consultant or business analyst on a Microsoft D365 Finance and Supply chain implementation, you may see, hear, or understand that certain features are only available when an environment is “Tier 2 or above.” Now, there are a lot of great posts elsewhere that dive into the differences between Tiers and what they are used for, but the general idea is that different Tiers are used for different purposes and workloads. In simple terms, the larger number of users and transaction volume per hour, the higher Tier you need. Cloud environments are Tier 2 and above. Every customer is provisioned a Tier 2 environment to be used for UAT purposes and their Production environment, which will be depending on sizing through their Subscription estimator. Tier 1 environments can be deployed and are great for demoing and general testing and learning, think “sandbox” environments.

Getting back to features that can’t be accessed without a minimum of a Tier 2…. if I was trying to demo embedded Power BI workspaces or Planning optimization, this would be really important to me. Sandboxes would do me no good in that scenario. Most of what you will read or need to know from a technical standpoint is showing this through LCS (Lifecycle services). Well, to be honest, MANY functional consultants will never be given access to LCS while configuring and implementing on a project. Sure, you could give them a cheat sheet of environments telling them which are Tier 1, Tier2, etc. Or you can go by a general rule of thumb that anything with Sandbox in the name or Contoso demo data is Tier 1 and ASSUME that the rest are at least Tier 2.

A colleague asked me this question recently “How can I tell if the environment is Tier 1 or Tier 2?” I did not know exactly how to answer that, so I did the same thing I always do…. I asked someone else who’s smarter than me (hold your jokes). My Technical Director gave me this hint “if the URL has a long string of random characters, it’s likely Tier 1 because MS managed environments have a simple naming taxonomy with company/env name, etc.” Now, I am not going to claim this is true as a 100% of the time rule, but it is a really good starter. Brilliant, this is just what I needed. Simple and MS managed = Tier 2 and higher, Random characters = Tier 1.

Now if someone asks me ” Can I test ‘X’ in this environment?,” I can answer that question.