Troubleshoot your Dynamics 365 system with the Health Hub

14 July 2021

The size of Dynamics 365 as a solution has grown dramatically over the last decade and when new capabilities and improvements are delivered, this is often met with unexpected behaviour such as bugs, process conflicts, user interface breaks and more. The chance of facing issues increases further when an organisation customises a system past the default environment.  When this happens, we firstly recommend you check you have configured your system correctly and trace your steps using Microsoft Dynamics 365 documentation website. If you've exhausted this and your problem hasn't been resolved, you could try to use the Dynamics 365 Health Hub.

The Solution Health Hub allows you to get a better picture of the state of your environment and detect issues with your Dynamics 365 environment.  It works by running validation rules, which each application having its own ruleset to run against. You can run these rules manually when you encounter an issue you wish to resolve, and you can also run the rules check automatically. 

If you were to run a health check on a marketing solution, it would detect:

1. Whether critical Marketing processes are deactivated.
2. Whether processes that will cause an upgrade failure are assigned to disabled user accounts.
3. Customised web resources that will later lead to runtime issues.

You can create your own custom health checks, however, we believe in most scenarios, the out of the box rules should be sufficient.

How to run a health check

To run an analysis job for Marketing:

1. Open the Solution Health Hub app.

   

2. On the welcome screen, select Continue in the lower right.

3. Select Analysis Jobs and create a new analysis job.

4. When the dialogue box opens, select the Marketing rule set.

5. Select OK and the analysis job will begin.

   

   View health check results

   Once you run the analysis job, you will be directed to the overview page. The overview page will automatically refresh when the run has finished. The following screenshot shows an example overview of a run.

   

   When running an analysis job, you will see a Return Status for each rule, which indicates whether the rule passed, failed, or there was a configuration error. Rules also return a severity if they are failing, which shows how severe each problem is. All possible return status outcomes are listed in the following table.

   Rule return status	Recommendation
   Fail	Highlights specific failures within the system; fix the rule as suggested.
   Warning	Be aware of the implications mentioned in the rule message.
   Pass	Indicates that there are no problems with this rule. All rules should be in this state.

Some rules will allow you to select and click 'resolve' which will attempt to fix related problems in the background. This button can be found above the analysis tab once a rule that has failed has been selected. 

For further analysis, you can select a rule that hasn't passed and view all of the records associated. You can export the failing records into an excel report for escalating to your consultants and partners if issues persist or for future reference. Records also contain date of the rule check and unique ID for referencing the specific health check event. 

In this example we used the Marketing application, however, you can use this across all of your applications. Hopefully, this will resolve some of the problems you encounter as you carry out activities in your Dynamics 365 solution.

Daniel Norris

Daniel Norris is the communications manager for Serversys. His role is to bring you the latest updates, tips, news and guides on Dynamics 365.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at communications@serversys.com