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Monitor and service the health of your Dynamics 365 solution implementation

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Your solution is deployed to production. Users are trained and onboarded. A support process is in place. You're done, right? Well…no. Most implementation projects focus on building and deploying the solution. What comes next is often treated like an after-thought. But it's important to have a plan for keeping your solution optimal and healthy, one that includes monitoring system health, applying service updates, and maintaining your environment. In this article, we discuss the importance of these activities and provide guidance on the best ways to manage them.

But wait, you might be thinking, Dynamics 365 is a cloud platform. Isn't Microsoft responsible for maintaining my environment?

Well…yes and no. Let's say you rent an apartment. The owner of the building is responsible for keeping up the building and common areas, providing plumbing and electricity for each apartment, and hauling away trash. It's your responsibility to keep your apartment in good condition. You should clean the apartment and throw out your garbage. You need to replace the light bulbs in your lamps if they go out, but if the kitchen sink gets blocked, you can contact the building manager to call a plumber to fix it. As the owner of the software platform, Microsoft is like the building owner, responsible for maintaining the platform—the building and the property in our apartment example. As our customer, you're like the renter, responsible for maintaining the health of your solution—the apartment.

To make sure that your system continues to run smoothly and provide helpful features to your user community, you should focus on three key areas: monitoring service health, applying service updates, and maintaining your environment. Let's take a closer look at each of these areas.

Monitor service health

Proper monitoring gives you visibility into the system's overall health. Automating the collection of diagnostic data and notifications from both the system and Microsoft helps you prioritize and address maintenance needs before little problems become big, expensive problems.

Apply updates

Dynamics 365 operates on a continuous update model, with regular releases throughout the year. We recommend that you be proactive in planning, communicating, and deploying service updates to take advantage of new features and enhancements.

Maintain environments

Taking care of your environments and data helps protect and optimize your solution. It's a team effort, not just the responsibility of IT admins. Partnering with your organization's business and technology resources helps make sure that the solution performs well and maximizes results for your user community.

Continue your business application journey

Just as your Dynamics 365 solution is continuously updated, your organization's users also benefit from continuous education in the trends and tools that are related to your business applications. Awareness of the product roadmap and improvements in related products helps maximize your organization's investment in the Dynamics 365 platform.

Case study

An agricultural company's implementation of Dynamics 365 included some extensions provided by an independent software vendor (ISV). The company discovered the ISV released updates late in the Dynamics 365 release cycle—or sometimes not at all—because of its internal processes. As a result, the company found itself unable to implement new Dynamics 365 features as they became available, and had to manually apply Dynamics 365 updates to maintain operations. Eventually, the company was able to work with the ISV to align its release schedule with Dynamics 365's, allowing enough time to test its solution during standard releases.

The lesson here is that simply implementing and updating your solution isn't enough. Be aware that third-party solutions can affect the Dynamics 365 release cadence. Keep track of how soon the updates can be applied in your environment to maximize the benefits of the latest Microsoft innovations as they become available.

Conclusion

Take steps to be aware of your solution's performance, be proactive in taking action, and be prepared with a solid strategy for maintaining your solution and environments. Keep up to date on trends and tools that can help improve your solution and your organization.

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