Growing up in South Western Ontario off the shores of Lake Huron meant that we got a lot of windy, unpredictable weather. It wasn’t until I moved to the other side of the province that I learned that snow *falls down* and not *sideways*.
With that type of weather meant quite often we would lose electrical power (“Hydro” as we call it in Ontario).
Depending on the situation, you would usually check with the neighbours if they also had power out as well. Final confirmation would be a call to the power company and a hope to get an answer when service is restored.
Today we have the internet and mobile phones, so if the power goes out at my house, I can quickly bring up Hydro Ottawa’s web site and see service outages and when the power is expected to come back online.
Dynamics 365
Did you know that Dynamics 365 also has a site to highlight service outages and issues? I am also surprised that some Dynamics 365 colleagues are not aware of this.
I realize that this also may come as a shock, but sometime software isn’t perfect, and that includes Dynamics 365 (as well as every other competitor…cough *NA14* cough)
Today I noticed an error while running a workflow that also ran a plug-in. This workflow worked fine yesterday. This also is a workflow/plug-in process from the D365 Online Portal managed solution, so also strange that it wasn’t working. (If it was something I had written… well then I might had thought it was a bug.)
When you experience an issue like this, the first place you should look is the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard. This is accessed by navigating to the Office 365 Admin portal and choosing “Health” and then “Service Health”.
From here you would see if there are incidents or advisories. Drilling down, I see that there is an issue with Plug-in failures, which also describes the issue I am seeing in Dynamics 365.
The details show the history of the incident, what is being done and when the next update is expected. Stuff happens.
Like waiting for the power company to restore service, there isn’t much you can do. You could potentially open a support ticket might help you connect with support who may be able to provide more timely updates.
Overall, outages and issue seem to be rare occurrences, but looking at the service dashboard could at least set your expectations in the event something isn’t working and also give you the peace of mind it wasn’t something you did that broke it! (This time)
Nick Doelman is a Business Application MVP who also gets annoyed when the power or internet go out. Oddly if the phone and email goes down, productivity seems to skyrocket.
ReadyXRM 