Hi Riley,
When you say hosted do you refer to CRM Online hosted by Microsoft or hosted by a partner? As there are two major differences between them. If you are talking about hosted by a partner then this is simply another CRM OnPrem environment which is managed by the partner. I will try to go through your questions and do a comparison between Online and Hosted (OnPrem)
What does it look like to support a larger hosted production environments where 15 min of down time is quite noticeable?
Both Online and Partner hosted - it depends on the SLA that you have with the provider. If you don't have access to the platform there isn't much you can do other than calling and reporting the the environment is down. CRM Online however is pretty stable as Microsoft has a solid uptime SLA.
How have your experiences been with MS support for general issues and for those extra special tricky issues?
I used to work as an Escalation Engineer with CRM Support in the past. As in any organization there are always opportunities to improve. Nowadays there is a closer collaboration between support and the product group so this might speed up resolution. Also Microsoft concentrates its efforts mostly on the Online Platform - so hwere you would be getting fixes faster than you would with an OnPremise environment.
Are there good troubleshooting tools for hosted environments that allow good self support or are we forced to use MS support for everything?
If you are using CRM Online - you can troubleshoot via
*Plugin Registration Tool Profiler for plugins (you can use also the plugin trace logs),
*Fiddler for web requests,
*IE Developer tool for browser related errors,
*Server Side Synchronization offers some diaglostic logs,
*the network diagnosti page blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/.../using-the-crm-diagnostics-page-to-capture-network-performance,
*Form load performance community.dynamics.com/.../crm-form-load-performance-analyzer
*Azure Telemetry docs.microsoft.com/.../sample-mscrm
Other than this, you need to reach out to Hosted environment provider (Microsoft for CRM Online or Parther for hosted onprem). Compared to OnPremise, CRM Online offers way less troubleshooting tools for the "End User" as you don't have direct access to the CRM Platform traces, which for CRM i find very very useful.
Are there things that a hosted environment need to do differently to be self supportable?
Not sure i understand this question but i'd say follow the best practices and support boundaries for customizations and you should be fine
Reporting wise if we have complex sql based reports, can Power BI within Dynamics accomplish everything that SQL can?
Power BI is a very strong tool however it still needs to go through the CRM WebServices to fetch the data. How complex are the reports ?
How would custom index's be applied if at all? Does MS actually do any indexing work?
Yes Microsoft can apply custom indexes - you need to go through support, they will analyze the environment and if needed they can apply indexes.
Performance wise, do we have any visibility on what things we can do to improve performance (such as long running reports query improvement, excessive plugin executions, excessively large system tables, ... )?
You can use the Organization Insights for this www.crmsoftwareblog.com/.../dynamics_365_crm_organization_insights and the Plugin Execution / Statistics tables. Keep in mind that for CRM OL the only plugins you can use are Sandboxed plugins. If you require code to run outside of the sandbox, you can use Azure Integrations (Functions, Service Bus, Web Apps, etc). I find this pretty solid the integration between CRM Online and Azure - also some of the integrations are built in.
Open floor what other support items would admin/dev types be concerned with for migrating then supporting a hosted environment?
In CRM Online: Get familiarized with the Office 365 Platform / Admin center, Power Apps, Flow and the cadence of updates and release of new features which happen more often than for CRM OnPremise
*docs.microsoft.com/.../manage-updates
*docs.microsoft.com/.../faq-update-policy
Arguments for or against migrating to hosted?
For CRM Online
*New features
*PG is committed in providing fixes faster
*Cloud - no need to worry about the infrastructure
*Azure Integration
*Integration with other Microsoft Office 365 Products
*CRM OnPrem in my personal opinion will be pushed aside.
Against:
*Fewer troubleshooting capabilities - you rely on support often
*Need to adapt to updates - code changes, redesign etc.
Hope this helps,
Radu
