D365 CE | Identify and clean up storage space

Accumulation of data over time can lead to storage issues that in turn impacts system performance in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE). If you're receiving constant notifications, it means you are reaching the capacity limits or already over capacity.

Here's how you can analyze the database capacity usage and steps you can follow to clean up the data using Power Platform, Bulk Record Deletion and Advanced Find.

Check Database Capacity

Here are the steps:

• To check database capacity navigate to Power Platform Admin Center.
• Click on Resources > Capacity. This takes you to the summary page that shows you the overall database usage and percentage available / over. In this case you can see that the Log is much over capacity. So let's see what do these Logs contain.

• If you click on Dataverse located across  the page as a tab next to Summary, you can see all the Environments and usage based on area like Database, File or Log storage.
• Click on the chart icon to see the details.

• Here you can see based on the area and tables that are occupying the most storage. In the below image you can see how the Log usage for table AuditBase has been growing exponentially.

So let's delete the Audit Logs and follow other methods to delete data from specific tables.

Free up storage capacity

• To do so, navigate to Power Platform Admin Center and click on the Environments.
• Select the Environment for which we need to delete the audit logs.

• Select Delete Audit Logs. You can also setup how long you want to retain the logs for for automatic ongoing maintenance.

• A window will pop-up from the right where one can select appropriate action.

Note: The system can take up to 24 hours to update storage information. It is recommended to wait up to 24 hours and monitor your storage.

This is one of the methods you can use to free up storage space.

• Similarly you can delete PluginTraceLogs (Advanced Settings > Settings > PlugIn Trace Logs).
• WorkflowBase

• Notes with attachments.

Hope this helps!

D365 CE | Preferred solution in Dataverse

Interesting concept that I recently came across is to "Set your Preferred Solution" in Dataverse.

By default if you do any unmanaged customizations in PowerApps Maker, are created under the default solution. The drawback is if I add a new field, instead of using the prefix for the solution that I have created, it would use the Common Data Service Default Solution prefix (i.e., new_ or cr_).

Microsoft has now provided an option to setup your preferred solution, so any customization you perform even outside your custom solution will automatically be added under your custom solution. To do so, we need to setup the custom solution as a Preferred Solution.

Here are the steps:

• When you login to PowerApps Maker, you can see there is an option to select the preferred solution.
• Click on Manage or click Set preferred solution.

• Select the solution from the dropdown or create a new solution.

• Once the preferred solution has been setup, you can test by going to the default solution and creating a new field or updating the character limit of an existing field. You will notice that the changes are automatically reflect in the preferred solution too.

Hope it helps!

How to use Power Query in Excel and connect to D365 CE (Part 1: Legacy)

Power Query is a robust tool that can be used to connect to the online services (like, Dynamics 365, SharePoint Online, Azure SQL DB, etc.) 

Below are the steps to connect to D365 CE:

• Open Excel
• Click Data > Get Data > From Online Services > From Dynamics 365 (online)

• Go to Advanced Settings in Dynamics 365 CE.

• Select Customizations > Developer Resources
• Fetch Web API URL from developer resources.

• Enter in the dialog box (this is a legacy connector)

• Click Organization Account and Sign in

• Once sign in is successful, click Connect.

• The Navigator will show all the tables that one can use to develop pivot tables, pivot charts etc.
• Select one or multiple tables that you want to use and transform and load the data into Excel.

Here are the steps to use the Dataverse connector.

Hope it helps!

How to use Power Query in Excel and connect to D365 CE (Part 2: Dataverse connector)

Microsoft has a released a new way to connect to Dynamics 365 via the Dataverse connector. To use the dataverse connector follow these steps:

• Open Excel > Data > Get Data > From Power Platform > From Dataverse

• Login using the user who has access to the data.
• Select one or multiple tables as required.
• Transform and Load data.

Hope it helps!