Dynamics 365 CRM Plug-In Trace Management

Overview

Dynamics CRM 365 (D365) Plugins/Workflows are essential to any custom development effort on the platform. They allow developers to extend and customize the system's functionality in a way that suits their business requirements. However, when things go wrong, it can be challenging to debug and troubleshoot these plugins. That's where the D365 plugin trace log comes in handy.

The plugin trace log is a powerful tool that provides insight into the execution of plugin code. It captures detailed information about the plugin's lifecycle, including input and output parameters, exceptions, and messages exchanged with other components in the system. This information can be invaluable when diagnosing and fixing issues with custom plugins.

Enable Plug-In Trace Log

1, Make sure that you have the System Administrator or System Customizer security role or equivalent permissions.

2, In the web app, go to Settings () > Advanced Settings.

3, Select Settings->Customization.

4, Choose the System Settings and then choose the Customization tab.

5, Enable logging to plug-in trace log description

You can store detailed information about an exception or trace event raised by a custom code to help developers debug plug-ins or custom workflow activity that they develop using the customization methods supported by customer engagement apps.

- To capture trace logs only for exceptions, select Exception.
- To capture logs for all errors and general trace events, select All.
- To disable capturing trace logs, select Off.

Best Practices

1, You should only use the value to ALL (Verbose) for very short periods of time when reproducing an issue and then turn it back to Exception or Off.  If possible, the recommendation is to never set this to “all” in your production environment.

Warning: Leaving the setting to “All” can lead to excessive table growth and cause performance issues and a possible outage.

2, It is recommended to have a bulk delete job on Plug-in Trace Log to keep the size of this table in check. 

• Only keep as much data as you need (recommend 7 days or fewer).
• There is an out-of-box bulk delete job named “Delete Plug-in Trace Log Records” that removes everything older than 1 day. Verify this job is running and successful.

More

This is a series of blogs introducing the Development Standards and Best Practices to help configure and customize CRM to do so consistently, clearly, and meaningfully.

Dynamics 365 CRM Development Standards and Best Practices.