These tips will help solve your Dynamics 365 CE support requests faster!

Have you ever struggled in opening a Dynamics CE Support request ? Or perhaps you are interested in ways to speed up the investigation for your support request ?
Then we have just the community post for you. These quick steps will guide you through the journey of opening a support request (SR), what to expect from it and information you can provide to reduce confusion and speed up the investigation. 

Index:

1. How to open a SR
2. To have in consideration when opening a SR
3. General Information for the Dynamics 365 CE SR
4. Specific information for the Dynamics 365 CE SR

How to open a SR:

To open a SR you can go to Power Platform Admin Center  Help + Support   + New support request:

You can use the following table to route you in case you are opening a SR outside Dynamics 365 or Power Platform:

To have in consideration when opening a SR:

1. Follow 1 issue per SR. It ensures every request is well tracked and that a support engineer is dedicated working with you towards the resolution of your issue, this can bring more clarity in understanding it and lead to improvements in documentation or design.

Notice also there are different teams inside Dynamics CE and Power Platform Support. Each one, specialized in different topics, hence one more reason to break down the SRs by issue, to ensure the engineer from the appropriate team is allocated. This is also why it is very important when you are filling the description and selecting the Problem Type to provide the most complete & correct information to ensure the SR is routed to the correct team and avoid transfers.

2. Some of the issues require the Support Team to test fixes on support environments before applying them on the affected organization. Hence, it is important to have in consideration if you can allow the Support Team to create a minimal/full copy of your organization to test a fix. The screenshot below addresses how you can do this when opening a SR:

3. Dynamics 365 technical support does not conduct RCAs as part of any support experience:

4. There are different severities for the SR. If you are opening a SR with severity A,  provide a short description of the business impact featuring:

1. Number of users affected
2. Financial impact
3. Project delay impact
4. Go-live date (if applicable)
5. Your comments on the issue

If you are not available to work 24x7 on your severity A case, the severity may be lowered to B if the support engineer requires information to progress the investigation only you can provide.

General information for the CE Support Request:

Besides a summarized description of the issue (this can be through text or video, screenshots are helpful as well), the information below will be helpful in troubleshooting your problem:

1. Provide any relevant error message you encounter.
2. Client/Activity/Correlation id or any GUID* that appears in the error message.
3. Does the erratic behavior reproduce consistently, on-demand or with random patterns ?
4. If this behavior is experienced in multiple organizations, please provide the URL of the relevant affected organizations.
5. Repro steps.
6. Current behavior description.
7. Desired behavior description.

* GUID - GUID stands for Global Unique Identifier. They are used to identify components, entity records but error messages can have them as well. In the error message below we can see a GUID, in this case an Activity ID:

Specific Information for the CE Support Request:

 Below follows a list of useful additional information you should provide when opening a SR, depending on the topic, to lead to a faster resolution.

Channel Integration Framework (CIF):

1. Which version of CIF are you using ?

 On-premises:

1. Which version of Dynamics 365 On-premises are you using ?
2.  Are verbose platform traces available ? (You can read more about these traces here).
3. If there is a networking issue, can a Fiddler trace be attached ?

 Plug-in's:

1. What is the name of the plug-in and affected plug-in step ?
2. Is the plug-in step async or sync ?
3. What are the Message, Primary Entity, Event Pipeline Stage of Execution and Execution Mode of the plug-in step (this information can be seen on Plugin Registration Tool as shown below).
4. Are there other plug-ins registered on the same entity / transaction that are relevant for execution ? If yes, please list them too.

Relevant Links:

• Troubleshoot plug-ins (Microsoft Dataverse for Apps) - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
• Do not use batch request types in plug-ins and workflow activities - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

Power Automate Flows:

1. What is the flow name ?
2. What is flow url ? (can be see on the screenshot below) :

        3. What is the environment ID of the flow ? (see below):

Power Platform Build Tools:

1. Are you using DevOps or Github actions ?
2. Are you using a pipeline or a release ?
3. Are you using Username/password (no MFA support) or Service Principal/client secret (if applicable) ?
4. Provide logs from the tool, if available.

 Ribbon Customizations:

1. Do you have customizations using Modern Commanding/Power Fx or Ribbon Workbench ?
2. What are the url's of the affected organizations ?
3. If the issue concerns a customization not reflecting, check if cleaning the browser cache mitigates it or check the component solution layers, if the button is managed.

Solutions:

1. What is the name of the affected solution ?
2. What is the organization url of the org from where the solution was exported ?
3. What is the organization url of the org where you are trying to import the solution ?
4. Is the impacted solution managed or unmanaged ?
5. If there are changes not reflecting have you checked if the affected component has an active layer on the target org ?

Relevant Links:

• Solution concepts - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
• Solution layers and merge behavior - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

 Unified Service Desk (USD):

1. What it the USD client version ? (it can be seen when launching USD - see below)

2. What is the USD server version ? (it can be seen on the Solutions list - see below)

3. Is the issue reproducible in browser navigation ? (Ctrl+N to pop-out the USD pane)

Virtual Entities:

1. What type of connector are you using ?

1. 1. Out-of-the-box (OOB)
   2. Virtual Entity with Custom Provider (plug-in)
   3. Virtual Entity from F&O/HR/Business central
   4. Virtual Connector Provider (solution) connection to SQL, Sharepoint or Excel
   5. Virtual Entity connected to SQL with custom plug-in

Workflows:

1. What is the name of the workflow ?
2. What is the id of the workflow ?
3. Is it a background or real-time workflow ? (see below)

Hope you find this community post useful.

Thank you for reading :)