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Howdy!
We are considering migrating from a on-prem 2015 to a hosted Dynamics CRM 365. We are using dynamics as a XRM to manage business workflow instead of a classic CRM use case (a.k.a. lots of customization). My main concern is support ability of a hosted environment, as I am the primary engineer for dynamics at my company and am expected to keep the system up while continuing to extend the platform. With a past hosted environment, I had pretty negative experiences with MS support. It was a absolute nightmare to get resolutions, let alone timely resolutions. Nearly all of our ms support tickets were closed out of frustration or we figured it out on our end after days/weeks of troubleshooting. After trying hard to use MS support we ended up giving up on even opening tickets at all as they were in the way more than they were assisting. Please note this was years ago and I hope does not reflect on today's state of MS support.
Some discussion points all related to a hosted environment:
What does it look like to support a larger hosted production environments where 15 min of down time is quite noticeable?
How have your experiences been with MS support for general issues and for those extra special tricky issues?
Are there good troubleshooting tools for hosted environments that allow good self support or are we forced to use MS support for everything?
Are there things that a hosted environment need to do differently to be self supportable?
Reporting wise if we have complex sql based reports, can Power BI within Dynamics accomplish everything that SQL can?
How would custom index's be applied if at all? Does MS actually do any indexing work?
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, ... )?
Open floor what other support items would admin/dev types be concerned with for migrating then supporting a hosted environment?
Arguments for or against migrating to hosted?
Whats your story success or failure for supporting a hosted environment?
Thank you all ahead of time, I am hoping that this thread can highlight the strengths/weaknesses of having to support a hosted Dynamics CRM environment.
Cheers,
Riley
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Hi Riley,
1. Since I left I supported/developed/implemented for both online and onprem. For OnPrem to be honest i don't need any support as i (still) know CRM inside out from my past MS days so can't share with you any experience.
With Online, I've reached out to Support as there were things that i couldn't do myself since i didn't have access to the CRM Platform. Experience was overall OK. Microsoft is investing a lot in improving support quality and time to resolution for a support incident. I think it is really important to understand the limitations of the product and. That is where i saw people struggling.
2. From experience with working with a lot of customers on various topics. What helps someone in support are
a. Clear repro steps - what are you trying to achieve, what outcome are you expecting and what is the actual outcome and also explain how everything is set up. There were situations when i had to reverse engineer a whole part of customizations / plugins / etc in order to isolate the problem - you can imagine that can extend the time of resolution.
b. Log files (ideally as short as possible - enabled right before reproducing the error and disabled immediately afterwards) and make sure these include the call stack. The call stack is the most important part when troubleshooting - might not always apply for OnPrem
c. see if you are able to reproduce the same behavior on a vanilla crm org (without any customizations) - this helps isolate the problem and also determine if it is a bug or customizations related issue. (see point a)
d. Even though this might sound hard, it's best to leave the engineer draw his own conclusions.
e. If you had good experience with an (some) engineer(s) then you can ask him to if he would be OK to pick up any support cases you might have in the future. If so, once you open a case you can drop him an email and see if he is available to pick it up - this however might not apply for escalation resources. (You already know that engineer and had a good experience with him and he probably knows your environment so it would make things smoother)
f. Make sure that you are active throughout the case - better than replying once a week or every couple of weeks. This way focus isn't lost.
g. If you have feedback you can also share it with the support manager or team lead. They are always available to discuss with customers.
3. This is a hard questions. SaaS doesn't give you access to the Platform - so you shouldn't worry about this pretty much. And i find it pretty stable with regards to the availability. Customization / Performance / Plugins troubleshooting i think there will be improvements. Now it depends on the types of issues you had in the past. OnPrem issues might not apply for Online. What issues did you have in the past where you struggled with support?
4. For reporting you can go with PowerBI and if there are large complex items, then you can also consider a data warehouse that you keep in sync with dynamics and use it for reporting. There are some Azure Solutions for example that you can use and also CRM has some features like docs.microsoft.com/.../use-change-tracking-synchronize-data-external-systems. For heavy reporting I think for some scenarios externalizing the functionality might be a better approach.
I hope i was able to answer your questions. If i can help you further, please feel free to reach out.
Regards,
Radu
Thank you Radu, for the well thought out reply! Indeed this will help me and I hope others with similar concerns :)
Some follow up discussion points.
1. Since you used to be an Escalation Engineer, are you supporting an environment now? If so how has your experience been with MS support in a general sense?
2. Any insider tips on how to work with MS support?
3. Do you foresee MS improving self support for Online in the next 3 years ish?
* I am referring to Online
** Report complexity, lets assume the full capacity of the reports utility via report builder. Its not uncommon for our queries to need rework due to the limits of the reports utility.
Based on my experience I would put us in the med-high complexity, and if the limits were to increase there are several high complexity reports that we would implement.
Cheers,
Riley
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
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