Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ...

User fear of D365 going down

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by zkasmani

I'm converted as a fan of PowerBI rather than Embedded SSRS for reporting. However I ran into an interesting user fear today, so I thought i would share it here.

The user has a report that is run every Friday and printed out in the legacy ERP system which is now being replaced with D365. We are talking about around 100 pages. While my suggestion was to do this report as a PowerBI report using Directquery - the users will have computers and don't need the printout - the response was "We need all our reports to be printouts (ie SSRS) because if the system is down we can keep working. We print everything we need for the next week for operations, even if we can use a screen".

I guess my question could be a poll - with modern cloud based computing, is this a realistic fear any more? Do people really see D365 crashing or having unexpected downtime in production like the old on-prem solutions?

I'm leaning towards this being an unfounded fear and is about change management and user expectation...maybe we can save some trees. Does anyone have any thoughts?

I have the same question (0)

All responses (7)

Answers (0)

Sergei Minozhenko 23,093 on at

Like (2)

Report

Hi Zahir,

It's quite real situation, but rare as well and MS is working constantly on the reliability of the components. At least I remember one major issue that happened in the last couple of years: it was not directly related to D365 itself, but it was Azure AD outage (or something similar) and users were not able to connect to PROD for 10+ hours.

If users are afraid to lose access to the system and they want to print it anyway, the solution can be a print document to electronic format (or database) and distribute it across different cloud vendors. It's quite unlikely that suddenly all vendors will have major issues with access to services.

For example, here is a link where you can check how often issues happen in Azure

status.azure.com/.../

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
André Arnaud de Cal... 301,035 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (2)

Report

Hi Zahir,

I have been working in ICT for a long time now. The downtime I did experience was the same as Sergei referred to, but also some issues at one customer which was an early bird on Dynamics 365. It is mature now and the uptime is let's say 99,99%. There is one additional risk compared to having all on-prem in your own building: The internet connection. This is usually always working, but due to road construction, someone might hit it.

Compared to on-premise environments (AX2012 and before), Dynamics 365 is much more available in my experience.

If they really want to print the data, I would suggest to print it to a file (PDF) which they can store locally as well.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Sandeep Chaudhury 3,303 on at

Like (0)

Report

Zakir,

That is an interesting concern :) Like we all know, Microsoft promises 99.99% service availability all the time, outages are not new to the cloud world, even though the occurrence are extremely rare. In my view, the users should not be worried about losing access to reports. If there is an outage, they will lose temporary access to all the components of the applications. In today's cloud era, especially for services from vendors like Microsoft, service availability should not be a concern for customers. ~75% of Fortune 500 companies run on the cloud and a lot of them are customers of Microsoft cloud and Dynamics 365.

Let us get the user confidence on this one :)

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi Zahir,

I have nothing really to add to what Andre and Sergei mentioned just some questions...

Imagine the worst case - system is down.

Will paper / printouts of a number of reports really help in this case?

If so, what do you want to do with all of that paper?

Chase people and processes by making phone calls based on outdated printouts?

Best regards,

Ludwig

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Rahul Mohta 21,032 on at

Like (0)

Report

try to avoid paper where possible and make information available digital

portals, self service insights are helpful

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

nmaenpaa 101,160 Moderator on at

Like (0)

Report

I think it really depends on your exact customer scenario. If the cloud systems would go down, but they would have these printouts, would they be able to operate? Are there lifes at risk without these reports? What kind of financial benefit (or loss prevention) would there be if they could still access these reports, but not the ERP?

As others have mentioned, it's not impossible that there is an outage, but it's very rare.

I also agree with others that it might be better to save the reports to PDF files and store them on local fileshares or host by another cloud provider.

By the way, just as a sidenote, you talked about Power BI reports and DirectQuery. If you want to use DirectQuery on PowerBi reports with cloud D365FO, you need to export data to external database or data lake. You can't access the prod database of a D365FO cloud system directly. But that's another topic, just wanted to point it out. Yyou can search for documentation and existing discussions, and post a new question if you still have some concerns.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
zkasmani 89 on at

Like (0)

Report

Thanks everyone for your responses. This is all very useful information.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No