Monthly Archives: September 2025

In a previous video, we discussed environments and their use, for Business Central. You can can have lots of different environments from production, sandbox environments, all with different code bases inside of them that enable different capabilities. But how do you manage those environments, see what versions they're on, deploy new environments, rename new environments, and just overall manage your environments as a Business Central administrator? Well, we're gonna take a look in this video. So here I am logged into the role center of Business Central. And if I wanna get access to all of my different environments, I can see the different names up here by clicking on my environments, but this isn't gonna allow me to manage these environments. In order to manage them, you have to come up here to the top right, hit your cog icon, and then scroll down to the admin center link here. So this is gonna pull me out into the Business Central admin center. Now this is where you're gonna get all the detail regarding your environments, their current versions, and then any sort of operations that are going on within your environments. So if I want to take a look at more of the specifics that are going on within my production environment, I can just take a look at this production environment URL. It's gonna drill through for me and then give me all the detail in regards to the things that are going on just from an administration standpoint. So I can look at the name. I can look at the region that it's deployed to. I can look at the current version that it's on. I can schedule version updates and update Windows from here as well. So some of the things I can do in here, I can look at all the different applications that are, add ons for this environment and their current versions. So all of the different independent software vendors that I may have extensions to the Business Central environment for or the offerings that come from Microsoft and they're, given, they're given extension packages. So in here, you can go through and install updates that are provided by those ISVs, and just see the given status of that environment and all the apps that are installed on it. Drill back in here to the production. I can also go in and look at the active sessions that are going on. You can see my current session here in our production environment and the last log in here. I can kick out this session. So if I wanna, cancel that given session and kick out that that specific user, I can control that here. Or one of the things we, refer to as the big red button, we can restart the environment from here. So this will kick out all users and actually launch a refresh of the environment. So that way, all of the services get turned on or turned off and then turned back on again, and then you get kind of a a fresh restart, for your environment, similar with what happens whenever you go through an update. So that's managing the sessions in the environment. You can also control the export of the database. So here under the database tab, I can select the database export. I can select what the the name of the file is gonna be. So this is gonna give me a SQL backpack file that then I can do an import into SQL Server Management Studio and take a look at all the data that's within this given environment. And then hooking up here a, SaaS URI. So looking at the, the endpoint that we're gonna be sending this data to, it's gonna be a Azure Blob storage URL with a, signed access signature at the end of that URL, just giving it access to be able to deploy this backpack there. So once I hit create, it's then going to launch that, database export, and then that's gonna be available in that Azure Blob storage for me, once it is completed. It normally is pretty fast for, environments that have less than ten gigabytes of data. You're gonna see it available in just a couple of minutes. If you have hundred gigs or more, it's gonna take upwards of thirty plus minutes in order to get that export for you. And just a a side note here, all these, these exports are limited to ten per month. So if you want additional, you will have to reach out to either your partner or Microsoft and then be able to go through and get some additional, added on. From here, you can also launch support requests that go either direct through your partner or direct to Microsoft. You can report a production outage, another big red button on here that will escalate, if there's any issues going on within your, production environment. Kinda get you the top of the, the service level there from from Microsoft and your partner. You can also control all the updates. So setting an update window, or setting the update date with all of our customers, we always ensure that they're set for a weekend, and within a window where there's gonna be downtime that's allowed. Business Central is very flexible in regards to the, the downtime. There really isn't an associated downtime. There's just a a window where some of the sessions are gonna be operating on the older version, some will be on the newer version. So we typically like to do this outside of, working hours. You can copy the environment to move all the data and code from one environment, to another. This is really useful when working within sandbox environments. Or you can restore a production environment over a sandbox environment. So take all of the data that is inside your production environment and restore that over to a new sandbox environment. This is great for testing, and going through any process that you would be within your production environment, but not actually affecting your real production database. You could rename the environment. So let's say you don't like the name production, you wanna change it, you can do that here as well. You can delete the environment. So you can go ahead and remove the entire environment, remove all access, delete all data, and code that's associated with that environment. This is another big red button on here that you only wanna give administrators access to. There are backups available post delete. So if you did accidentally delete environment, don't worry. There are environments, still available for you that you can do a point in time restore up to a certain point, with Microsoft. And then over here on the left, showcasing some of the different menu items that you can get access to, The notification recipients is gonna allow you to put in emails that will receive alerts for all the operations for environment. So update Windows, database exports, if there's support tickets that are, entered into. The Microsoft Entre apps is the connection between all of the, security and associated licenses and all the apps that have registration with you through secret IDs. The telemetry is gonna show all of the events that are happening within your environment. So if there is any changes, so an event that happens within a given window, so let's just say a hundred minutes here for the production environment, it's gonna then go and look at all the objects that are running and all the functions that are running and if there's any associated failures as well. So you can see all of the code that's running on here, in the given session that, that performed it. And then there is the reported outages, that that big red button around the production outages. You could see if there's been any tickets associated with that. Operations is gonna show you all the operations, for the the, last given window. So this update happened within a sandbox environment. You can see exactly when it started, when it was created, when it was completed. And then lastly, here you have the capacity showing all of the amount of storage that is within your environment. So with the we're within our organization, we have three hundred user licenses, which it gives you two gigabytes per essential license and three gigabytes for every premium license. It's the amount of storage that you get, plus just the purchase of a single business central license, you're gonna get a default eighty gigabytes. So all this adds up to your total storage used. We have so many licenses and so men so much within, our tenant that we have, not quite a lot used. But in here, you're gonna be able to see all the amount of usage by environment and list out the tables that actually store all of that data. One, one given thing is that all of this usage is aggregated across all of your environments. So it's not just within one environment, it's across all of them. So this three hundred and eighty gigabytes that are available for us is for our production environment and then our three sandbox environments that we have. And that's managing environments within the Business Central admin center in a nutshell. There's a lot of capabilities that you can take advantage of there to ensure that you're running your operations efficiently, getting updates scheduled when you need to, ensuring that you're not, causing any issues for for users that are out there, and just seeing overall the telemetry for your environments and if there's errors that are going on. Hopefully, you got some value out of this video, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one.