Design best practices for Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Article
10/21/2023

These design best practices help configure and extend Microsoft Sustainability Manager support the pillars of Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Configure Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Use the configuration guide within Microsoft Sustainability Manager to ensure that you complete the configuration steps in the recommended order.
Start simple and focus on enabling one scenario/emission scope first.

For example, if you decide to start calculating scope 2 emissions for purchased electricity, follow the whole configuration process once. This first run brings in the reference data that's connected to that activity (including contractual instrument types, if applicable). It also brings in the models, emission factors, profiles, and other data. Then, view the results of this process in the automatically generated analysis reports. By observing the end-to-end process in action with minimal data, you can more easily expand your solution for other sources of emissions.
Define all attributes of the organization before beginning your implementation. Defining attributes properly at the start helps set up the organization for success with a solid configuration and an architecture that can scale. For example, some organizations might require you to account for the use of different units of measurement in different countries/regions.
Consider all operational factors for successfully recording, reporting, and reducing carbon emissions. The structure of businesses can change, such as when they add new operations, facilities, or product lines. If you don’t have the relevant facilities in the solution when you bring in emission source data, the calculations break.
Use connectors to business systems or other sources to enable a continuous stream of data.
Set up reference data according to regulations, conversions, and level of granularity.
Identify regulatory requirements in countries/regions where operations exist. Regulatory requirements in different countries/regions dictate your needs, determining aspects such as emission factors.
Specify units and conversions to avoid calculation errors. You can convert units of measurement. Observe conversion units based on activity and model units.
Define the solution landscape in terms of reporting needs and level of granularity. Consider the level of granularity that you need for reporting purposes. For example, if you need to track a specific line of business, set up your facilities with a name that contains the facility and line of business in the name, such as Contoso pod facility – organic beans.
Pay special attention to factor mapping to optimize the number of required calculation models. Before setting up factor mappings, you need to set up emission factors and reference data. Make sure that you include a factor mapping for each piece of reference data in a category. If a calculation is based on a factor mapping, but you haven’t mapped reference data, the calculation fails because the factor mapping can’t be assigned.
Test your calculation models using an iterative approach with small sets of data to help make validation easier.
Consider special naming conventions to support specialized calculations for facilities with specific operations that require different emission factors.
Test your models on small sets of data to help make validation easier. You can also limit a profile to specific datasets, or ranges of data, so that only data within that range runs through the model. This feature is beneficial when you get started with Microsoft Sustainability Manager because it allows you to test your models on small sets of data to help make validation easier.
Share the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model to drive integrity. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model breaks down data silos across emissions sources and centralizes emissions data in a common format. Organizations can share this publicly available data model with their teams, vendors, and trading partners to drive data integrity and consistent reporting upstream and downstream.
Configure data connections using service accounts wherever possible. This practice helps organizations to avoid issues related to data connections when the user who created the connection leaves the organization.
While using the Excel template-based ingestion, download and use the latest files from the Sustainability Manager.
While using the Power query guided ingestion, use the data transformation tools checklist. This checklist helps ensure you perform required data transformation steps, validate mandatory attributes, and validate master data reference before importing the data into Sustainability Manager.
Follow naming conventions while creating data connections to organize them better.
Example: <Scope * - Data category - Data Source - Data refresh type>
- Scope: Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3
- Data category: Activity, Reference, Emission
- Data Source: Manufacturing, Finance, etc.
- Data refresh type: Full, Incremental, One time.
  - For organizations with many data connections created, this convention helps to easily search and access required connections.
  - Provide a meaningful description for each connection to elaborate the required details regarding the need for auditing and traceability purposes.
Set up data refresh for data connections to ensure that data is refreshed at the required frequency.

Extend Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Don't include all assets of out of the box entities in your extension solutions. Only include subcomponents that you need to override behavior. This practice also reduces issues of deployment failures due to unnecessary dependencies established between solutions.
Be careful about overriding existing solution components because it overrides default behavior moving forward. Look for opportunities to clone existing forms and views and use them for your extension instead of the default solution components.
Use the solution checker regularly to identify customization issues and get links to recommended resolutions.
Custom dimensions are best used when organizations want to prioritize meaningful insights and avoid excessive customization.

Reliability

For a reliable on-premises data gateway infrastructure design, consider the design recommendations described in Plan, scale, and maintain a business-critical gateway solution:

Use the gateway high availability and load balancing features of on-premises data gateway for any business-critical gateway cluster.
Keep your gateway cluster recovery keys secure; otherwise, you can't add new gateways.
Separate nonproduction gateway clusters from production ones.
For a solution with many users, use multiple gateway clusters for different business units.
Determine gateway server hardware specifications based on Power Query transformations and CPU and memory needs. Scale up or scale out based on the performance metrics monitored.

Cost optimization

Define the data residency requirements of the transactional data and design a Dataverse data retention strategy to reduce storage costs.
Move historical data to a cheaper long-term storage option that respects your retention policies.

Security and compliance

Segment your organization access by role or department, and copy roles to each business unit. You can create more roles by copying the existing ones and changing the privileges as needed. For more information, go to Save time creating a security role by copying one and Segment access by role or department.
As part of your enterprise-wide strategy, you can consider Microsoft Purview for data classification.

Microsoft Purview can connect to and classify the Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Power BI services used in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. For more information, go to Security in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
Use Defender for Cloud to protect Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability workloads.

Defender for Cloud provides Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) for all your Azure, on-premises, and multicloud (Amazon AWS and Google GCP) resources. Defender for Cloud generates security scores, recommendations, and alerts for the following elements of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability:
- Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365
- Microsoft Power BI
- Dynamics 365
- Identity and Microsoft Entra integration
- Microsoft Sentinel
For more information, go to Security overview.
Use Microsoft Sentinel to deliver intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise and Microsoft Sustainability workload.

You can integrate the following services used in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability into Microsoft Sentinel. This integration provides a full view of your security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution.

For guidance on deploying, managing, and using Microsoft Sentinel, go to Best practices for Microsoft Sentinel.

Configure your auditable logs in Microsoft 365 to gain a richer view of your data.

Microsoft provides an extensive set of logging and audit capabilities that are included in Microsoft Purview compliance portal and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. You can enable logging and monitoring for each service capability. The following resources provide more information:

Performance efficiency

Narrow the calculation profile criteria. Because of the complexity of calculations, you should limit each calculation profile to no more than 50,000 records.
Keep resources in a single cloud to maintain maximum control and allow the cloud provider to optimize network routing.
Maximize network utilization within the same cloud and region. Ingesting data from sources in multiple regions has a networking impact. However, any network traffic destined for the internet or a component in another cloud involves the public internet's router resources, which you have no control over regarding resource impact measurement or utilization.

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