Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Buxton

Buy this Book

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

By: Simon Buxton

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamic is a powerful ERP solution for global enterprises to support industry-specific and various operational business processes. This single solution enhances various aspects of manufacturing, retail, service, and public sector industries. Due to its intriguing capabilities such as finance and supply chain management, business intelligence and reporting, and project management, it is one of the most widely used solutions, having been adopted by many organizations across the globe. If you are one of those who help organizations in administering this unique solution, this book should be in the tool belt of any AX developer to ensure compliance and simplify the ongoing management of the system. Providing administrators who are involved in system administration and management with clear guidance on many administration tasks, this book is packed with systematic instructions of hands-on examples and in-depth explanations Even for experienced users, this book will serve as a great source of reference by providing new ways of working with Microsoft Dynamic through the book's easy-to-follow approach. This hands-on guide looks at key administration tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. You will be provided with practical guidance that will allow you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in Dynamics AX 2012 in order to simplify and automate the ongoing management while maintaining compliance. This practical book simplifies user management operations by automating the tasks of hiring new people—joining up HR and security roles through organizational hierarchies. In-depth explanations teach you about AX licensing and how to make the most of your license. Management of models and the model store (including installing hotfixes and addons), as well as details of how they work are provided, along with practical guidance on the procedures required to reduce risk and downtime. This book guides you through the key tasks in reporting and BI through in-depth knowledge of the Batch Framework and Alerting. Finally, important tasks in performance, system monitoring, and troubleshooting are provided with in-depth guidance and further reading. With this comprehensive guide, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the system and make better decisions as your company’s requirements evolve.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Managing Users in AX 2012

Introduction

Creating a new Dynamics AX user

Creating a Claims (flexible authentication) user

Importing users from the Active Directory

Understanding the user request workflow

Defining user relations and basic roles in human resources

Assigning roles to users

Assigning profiles to users

Managing users by PowerShell commands

User groups, what happened?

Working with Licensing in AX 2012

Introduction

Adding a new license key

Importing a license file

Managing configuration keys

Reporting your user license count to Microsoft

Making the most out of your AX 2012 license

Model Management

Introduction

Transferring an XPO

Installing an AX model

Managing conflicts

Uninstalling a model

Exporting or importing a model store

Refreshing an environment from live

Applying a hotfix from Microsoft

Clearing application user caches and usage data

Setting Up and Managing the Application Object Server

Introduction

Installing an additional object server

Creating a server cluster

Configuring an AOS instance as a batch server

Draining users

Taking an AOS offline

System Monitoring

Introduction

Setting up alerts for failed batch jobs

Monitoring workflow

Configuring database change tracking

Configuring Dynamics AX SQL tracing

Setting up Dynamics AX and SQL server counters

Configuring and running trace – the tracing cockpit

Setting Up and Managing E-mails and Batch Processing

Introduction

Setting up e-mail parameters

Configuring the e-mail templates

Monitoring e-mails

Setting up batch groups

Mapping batch groups to batch servers

Assigning a task to be performed as a batch task

Setting Up and Managing Alerts

Introduction

Using basic alerts setup

Setting up alert e-mail templates

Creating a change-based alert

Creating a due-date-based alert

Managing alert rules

Cleaning up the notifications

Setting Up and Managing Legal Entities and Partitions

Introduction

Creating a partition

Connecting to the partition

Configuring the new partition

Creating a new legal entity

Placing the legal entity in the organizational hierarchy

Other tasks after creating a legal entity

Setting Up and Managing Workflow

Introduction

Setting up a workflow

Setting up organization-specific parameters

Administering and troubleshooting workflows

Setting up delegation

Setting Up and Managing Security

Introduction

Manually assigning users to roles

Dynamically assigning users to roles

Creating a model for security

Creating a new security role

Adding duties and privileges to a role

Overriding role permissions

Setting up record-level security

Maintaining date-effective policies

Segregation of duties and mitigating risk

Setting Up and Managing Reports and BI

Introduction

Adjusting a report server's configuration

Setting up report deployment settings

Deploying reports

Creating Cue definitions

Adding a Cue group

Adding Cues

Editing quick links

Configuring Analysis Services

Setting Up and Managing the Application Integration Framework

Introduction

Installing web services on IIS

Creating an enhanced inbound port

General Performance-related Tasks

Introduction

Cleaning up the general ledger data

Cleaning up the procurement and sourcing data

Cleaning up the sales and marketing data

Cleaning up the inventory and warehouse management data

Cleaning up the old calendar dates

Cleaning up notifications

Reindexing tables or the whole database

Compressing the database tables

Synchronizing the database

Truncating a table

Running a consistency check

Optimizing the model store

System monitoring – determining what to monitor

As well as covering the key recipes in Chapter 5, System Monitoring it is important to understand what to monitor. This section provides further information on how the system hangs together in terms of various interdependencies.

The hardware and network Infrastructure

Assuming that we have a well-designed, highly available environment, many failures can occur without any effect on the operation of the system. Of course, once a server or a component has failed over, you are at great risk of whether these failures would further occur.

As a part of the High Availability (HA) design, points of failure will be identified and as a part of this, the events that need to be monitored will also be identified.

This will include the following:

SAN Disk failure
SAN component failure (for example, power supply)
SQL Server failover (assuming setup in a cluster)
SQL Server Analysis Services failover (assuming setup in a cluster)
SQL Server reporting services failure
SQL agent (if this is used for maintenance jobs and so on)
Dynamics AX 2012 Server instance failure
Dynamics AX 2012 Retail component failure
Dynamics AX Workflow (IIS)
Dynamics AX AIF services (if hosted on IIS)
SharePoint component failure (impact includes role centers and document management template libraries)
Network infrastructure failure

For this reason, it is common for IT departments to carry spare hard drives, power supplies, and so on in stock so that they can be quickly replaced. And of course, a new spare should be ordered as a matter of urgency.

Note

The availability of reporting and analysis should be given a higher priority in this plan than previously experienced. For instance, if the report server is down, you can't produce reports, which means you can't produce invoices.

Dynamics AX 2012 server environment monitoring

This primary focus of this chapter is the monitoring of the critical server software key to the operation and performance of Dynamics AX 2012, which is often neglected until a component fails.

To perform the basic operations of Dynamics AX (such as entering sales orders and printing invoices), the following three components must always be available:

Dynamics AX Server instance(s)
Microsoft SQL Server database engine
Microsoft SQL reporting services

For the Enterprise Portal to be available, the SharePoint server must be available.

For most Business Intelligence functions, the following are the prerequisites:

Enterprise Portal (role center)
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

Both Dynamics AX Server and SQL Server are complex systems and offer monitoring both within the client application (AX Client and SQL Server Management Studio) and within the Windows Server operating system.

Note

System health monitoring should be as non-intrusive as possible and have a minimal impact on the system's performance. Some tracing tools and methods can cause the performance problems we are trying to prevent.

Dynamics AX 2012

Dynamics AX 2012 has several internal components (or frameworks as they are sometimes called) that are required for many "line of business" operations to succeed. These include the following:

Batch framework
Workflow
Application Integration Framework (AIF)

There are two methods of monitoring these components: Dynamics AX's alerts or external monitoring tools such as System Centre Operations Manager.

With reference to System Centre Operations Manager 2012, Microsoft has supplied a management pack that monitors these three components. This runs independent of AX.

Retail components are not listed here as they should be monitored along with the other Windows services.

Note

The AX built-in alerts rely on the batch framework, and if this is not running, no alerts will be generated.

Batch framework

The batch framework will process the following categories of batch jobs:

Task category	Example jobs
Recurring system batch jobs	Workflow User license count Alerts Automatic role assignment Process subledger entries
Recurring user batch jobs created by the administrator	AIF processing Custom integration routines Sales invoice processing MRP calculation
Recurring or once-only user batch jobs	Process sales invoice run Process a periodic update task

When tasks are created, you have the option to be alerted on completion, cancellation, or when an error occurs.

This alert will be sent to the user that submitted the batch job (by default), which may not always be the correct target. Also, if the batch routines are not being processed, no alerts will be generated. It uses the batch framework to process the alerts.

Workflow

Workflow can fail at several levels and each may require a different person to deal with the issue. Following are some examples:

Workflow URL becomes unavailable	AX Administrator, submitting user
Workflow instance stops, system error	AX Administrator, submitting user
Workflow instance stops, configuration	Workflow Designer, submitting user

When the workflow was designed, the various alerts were set up to go to the appropriate person. This requires the batch framework to be available and processing alerts for this to succeed.

Application integration framework

If this fails, it is normally due to an external fault (for example, a file URI was deleted or permissions changed), but occasionally it is due to a change to the code or the data dictionary (that is, changes to the data dictionary, especially field lengths, do not automatically reflect to the document schemas).

You cannot add an alert for this component or configure a notification for this from within AX.

Microsoft SQL Server

SQL Server will (if properly configured, with appropriate maintenance plans) perform without any user interaction. The main causes of failure within SQL Server are for reasons beyond its control, for example, a hardware component failure.

Other than total failure, SQL Server may become less responsive, affecting the user experience within AX. The typical reason for this is poor configuration or maintenance of SQL Server.

There are many reasons for this:

Index fragmentation
Statistics (used by SQL to calculate the execution plan)
TempDB incorrectly configured (for example, the number of files per core)
Incorrect configuration of the Dynamics AX database
Incorrect configuration of data and log files (although this is mitigated if we SSDs)

This is beyond the scope of this book, but correct configuration, sizing, and maintenance of your SQL Server can't be emphasized enough.

In terms of general health monitoring, the disk subsystem is the most critical and the most common (in our experience) cause of failure. This is characterized by the following:

Database file space: Imagine the database files are virtual hard drives, which can autogrow formatting space within the 'file' as required
Disk space (local and SAN): If the disk is full, the database file can't grow, which will pause the SQL Server database.

What to monitor?

The Dynamics AX 2012 can be thought of as a dependency chain, each component relying on another. Most components will be monitored as part of your hardware and network infrastructure's high availability design, some require special consideration.

If you plan to use System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM), or another environment health monitoring solution, the process does become much easier, especially when they come with preconfigured management packs for Dynamics AX 2012.

Each implementation will have its own hardware and network infrastructure solution, meeting the aims of performance and high availability. Determining exactly what to monitor depends largely on this design.

The answer to what to monitor can be given by reviewing your business processes, such as "Order to Payment":

Enter Purchase Order: Dynamics AX Client, Dynamics AX Server
Send confirmation to Supplier: SSRS, AIF
Process ASN (advanced shipping notice): AIF
Process delivery receipt: Barcoding solution, AIF, batch framework
Process invoice: Batch framework
Process payment: File share (export file), Exchange / AIF (remittance)

This is a very simplified example, but attempts to highlight that AX has dependencies, and these vary for each implementation.

The following worksheet is a generic view on what to monitor to ensure that AX is functioning in a typical scenario.

Component	Dependent on	Monitored by	Method
AX Search (unified application search)	Supported Search Server	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
Help	Help Server IIS	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
Batch framework	Dynamics AX instance (batch)	AX administrator System administrator	Manual check Ops Monitoring
Batch jobs	Batch framework	User AX administrator	Alerts
Workflow framework	IIS Batch framework	AX administrator System administrator	Alerts Ops Monitoring
Workflow instance	Workflow Batch framework	AX administrator Workflow designer	Alerts (within WF)
Application Integration Framework	External Services Batch framework	AX administrator System administrator	Manual check Ops Monitoring
AX Reports	SSRS	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
Dynamics AX instance	SQL Server	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
Enterprise Portal	Dynamics AX SharePoint	System administrator	Windows notifications Ops Monitoring
SharePoint Server	IIS SQL Server	System administrator	SharePoint Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
Business Intelligence	SSRSs SSAS	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
SSAS	SQL Server SAN	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
SSRS	IIS SSAS SQL Server Dynamics AX	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications
SQL Server instance	SAN	System administrator	Windows notifications Ops Monitoring SQL Server
Host servers	SQL Server instance	System administrator	Ops Monitoring Windows notifications

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Buxton

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

By: Simon Buxton

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

System monitoring – determining what to monitor

The hardware and network Infrastructure

Note

Dynamics AX 2012 server environment monitoring

Note

Dynamics AX 2012

Note

Batch framework

Workflow

Application integration framework

Microsoft SQL Server

What to monitor?