Introducing managed operations for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
Operational Excellence for Mission-Critical Applications
With over 48 million monthly users, Microsoft Power Platform is transforming how organizations deliver modern AI-powered customer experiences, improved employee satisfaction, and business results. Customers increasingly rely on the Power Platform to run global-scale, mission critical workloads, where the risk and business impact of failure are high. These workloads demand operational excellence: highly controlled change management to avoid unexpected disruptions to stability and quality, deep insights into ongoing operations to detect and resolve issues, and resiliency to recover from failures.
To address these needs, we are pleased to announce Power Platform managed operations, a suite of capabilities to empower organizations of all sizes to build, deploy, and operate their most critical workloads. Built with both existing and emerging AI-driven solutions in mind, these capabilities ensure stability and minimize disruption while maximizing the productivity of operations teams.
Application Lifecycle Management
A 2023 study from the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) highlights that fixing bugs after deployment can be up to 30 times more expensive than addressing them during the requirements, design phase, or pre-production stage.
Managed operations ensure high-quality releases with a comprehensive, integrated set of DevOps tools. New deployment experiences allow organizations to scale through admin-approved deployment pipelines. Deployment approvals are streamlined with notes that describe what is deploying to production. These deployment experiences make it easier than ever to detect, root cause, and resolve deployment failures. Further, deployments can also extend to include your custom processes, such as performance optimization checks or data validation workflows. Deployments performed by a service principal account maintain least privileged access to production environments. Also, available to run standalone or as a part of a deployment is Power Apps Test Engine, which is currently in preview, it executes test automations on standalone canvas apps and it simplifies testing with features like Power Fx-based YAML test authoring, DOM abstraction for control references, and connector mocking to avoid API side effects. These change management capabilities maximize the reliability of your applications, flows, and agents in production.
Observability and Insights
Managed operations enable teams to quickly detect, triage, and respond to issues to minimize impact on end-user experiences or your business processes. New monitoring experiences provide out-of-box metrics that represent end-user experiences or successful use of technology supporting your business processes. These metrics help detect production degradations and are complimented by in-product recommendations that provide actionable guidance to improve performance and reliability. These new monitoring experiences are available without dependency on Azure Application Insights or Azure Data Lake. However, built-in integration with these services is also available to easily ingest and process Power Platform and Dynamics 365 logs with Azure Application Insights. With Dataverse integration with Fabric Shortcuts, now available in early private preview, you can instantly bring D365/Power Platform inventory into Fabric, ensuring that your teams have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. This streamlined access accelerates insights, enhances decision-making, and simplifies data management, empowering you to make impactful, data-driven choices faster than ever before.
Built for Data Resilience
In today’s data-driven world, ensuring data resilience is essential for businesses operating at a global scale. Managed operations enable organizations to protect and recover their data seamlessly with a range of flexible backup and retention capabilities:
- Extended Backup Retention: Customers can now extend their backup retention from seven to 28 days. Learn more.
- Self-serve Disaster Recovery: Self-serve disaster recovery is now available in private preview. Admin can perform a Disaster recovery drill or real time “Emergency response” failover and failback with this feature. Join the early preview.
- Recycle Bin for Table Records: Users may delete records or transactions intentionally or accidentally, through both manual and automated processes, including single, multiple, or bulk deletions. The new recycle bin feature, currently in preview, addresses challenges in recovering deleted data within a configurable timeframe, providing a safety net to intentional or accidental data loss. Learn more.
- Long-Term Retention: A table can be enabled for a long-term data retention policy. All parent and associated child activities, emails, attachments are retained as a set when you set up a policy on a parent table. Customers can use retention policies to securely store inactive and or infrequently used data long-term in Azure Data Lake tiers, providing a cost-effective solution for archiving while ensuring compliance and easy access. Learn more
Together, these features strengthen data resilience by offering flexible, scalable backup and retention solutions, empowering businesses to safeguard their data reliably and efficiently.
Empowering Enterprises to Operate with Confidence
Managed operations represents a new era in application management, enabling enterprises to support mission-critical workloads at scale in an evolving digital landscape. It is time to take advantage of the Microsoft Power Platform’s AI-driven potential in your enterprise. Get started now with confidence knowing that you are backed by the dynamic and resilient capabilities of managed operations at your disposal.
