Production support and monitoring

To ensure a good experience during the implementation of a project and after go-live, understand the different types of servicing that are available and how to get the correct support for every scenario. This article explains how to engage each type of support and learn about some of the available tools.

Microsoft tools and support help ensure the stability and effectiveness of your environment by providing infrastructure and application support. However, this support is effective only if partners and clients correctly develop, test, configure, manage, and monitor the implemented system and its environments.

Supporting actions

You can group supporting actions into three categories:

• Self-service
• Service request
• Support request

Each category triggers actions in different ways and might involve different lead times.

Self-service

Users can trigger self-service actions at any time, and these actions involve no lead time. Here are some reasons why a user might initiate a self-service action:

• Promote code in non-production environments.
• Move databases between non-production environments.
• Upgrade a production environment.
• Turn maintenance mode on or off.
• Pause upcoming automatic deployment of a service update.
• Restart services in non-production environments.
• Complete performance actions.

Service request

Creating a support ticket usually triggers service requests. These requests require the cooperation of the Dynamics Service Engineering (DSE) team and involve designated lead time. For example, you might create a service request to request environment deployment.

Recommended practices for working with the DSE team

• Consider that there are turnaround times or Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each type of service request.
• Don't use a service request if a support request is more suitable for your case.
• To ensure that you make the correct type of request, see Service request types and SLAs.

Support request

You can usually resolve other scenarios by opening a support request. These requests involve lead time. Here are some reasons to create a support request:

• Perform a point-in-time restore of a production environment after go-live.
• Flag a regression in a service update, and ask for an exception opt-out.
• Make performance-related requests for tasks that you can't complete through self-service.
• Activate a flighting feature, such as customer and vendor master data sharing.
• Resize a production environment. First, update and upload a new usage profile in the subscription estimator in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services [LCS].
• Create an additional LCS project in the same tenant.
• Move the tenant of production environments.

Requesting support

An effective support process requires a clear escalation path. Project teams (client or partner) should be able to monitor and read environment telemetry, and they should be capable of doing any initial troubleshooting that is required.

A well-identified issue and a well-defined resolution process can make a difference in the effectiveness of the outcome.

Include the following details in your support request:

• The environment where the issue occurs
• The process where you identified the issue
• Reproducible steps that show where the issue occurred
• The expected result and the actual result
• Pre-investigation of the issue
• Additional elements, such as the error message, screenshots, session ID, and trace

High-severity support requests

Include the following information in a high-severity support request:

• Business impact: How does the issue affect your business activities?
• Financial impact: How does the issue affect your business at a financial level?

Before reporting an issue, perform a thorough analysis. The incident resolution is faster when the support request includes detailed information and uses all available tools and telemetry. By including all the correct information when you submit a support request, you reduce the amount of back-and-forth communication needed to identify and replicate the issue. Therefore, you save time.

Choose from several support plans to find one that meets your business needs.

Before you request support, choose the correct level of severity. For information about how to identify the correct severity level and estimate the initial response time for your request, see Support overview and Report a production outage.

Monitoring elements

LCS has an integrated set of tools that you can use to monitor LCS projects.

Service health dashboard

The Service health dashboard provides the health status for Office 365 services.

You can also view the service health through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Go to Health > Service health, or select the Service health card on the Home dashboard.

By default, the All services tab is selected on the Service health page. It shows all services and their current health state. A symbol and a value in the Status column indicate the state of each service.

If you're experiencing an issue with a Microsoft 365 service but the issue isn't listed on the Service health page, you can notify Microsoft by selecting Report an issue and completing a short form.

The issue reporting process helps Microsoft identify problems and understand how widespread they are. After Microsoft identifies an incident, it appears on the dashboard under service health.

You can sign up to receive email communication. By using this feature, you can ensure that you're quickly alerted about identified issues in the tenant and any status changes.

Environment monitoring

Environment monitoring is a set of tools that help you monitor and troubleshoot the health of your environments through LCS.

On a specific environment page for a project, the Monitoring section includes an Environment monitoring link that takes you to the Environment monitoring dashboard.

The following subsections describe some of the available tools.

Overview

The Overview section is common to most environment types. It provides a filterable way to trace user activity and to trace load by activity during a defined period.

Activity

The Activity tab lets you query raw logs. It provides predefined queries for the most common events and metrics to help you monitor your environment. Here are some examples of the predefined queries that are available:

• Long queries
• Deadlocks
• Crashes
• Financial reporting issues
• Batch throttle
• Distinct user sessions

Additionally, you can add your own custom filters and export the logs to a comma-separated values (CSV) file for analysis.

Health Metrics

The Health Metrics dashboard provides a series of line charts that are filtered by instance (AOS or Batch AOS) and time frame. On the AOS tab, you can observe SQL execution. On the System tab, you can observe system memory and CPU utilization over time. This tool helps you easily identify behavioral changes. Therefore, it can help you trace issues over time and the impact of changes in the solution.

For additional content related to monitoring LCS environments, see Performance troubleshooting using tools in Lifecycle Services (LCS).

Although it's important that you monitor your environments, you don't have to be on constant lookout. Microsoft also uses the emails that you provide in the LCS notification list to alert you about important issues and actions that you must take, and to provide preventive guidance for the implementation itself.