AX / D365 Performance monitoring tools and tips (Part 1)

Recently after sometime got involved into another health check project , learned few new thing and explored some more tools , decided to list down all the available tools for reference, this post will cover the tools available for Diagnostics and Analysis of Dynamics AX and D365 FO and how to set them 

• Trace Parser
• Performance monitor.(Perfmon)
• PAL((Performance Analysis of Logs)
• Dynamics Perf
• IDMF (Intelligent Data Management Framework)
• Visual Studio Profiling Tools to trace CIL
• Performance SDK and task recorder
• Elastic Stack (Diagnostics)
• Performance Timer

Here is a brief on all these tools without going into extensive details

Trace Parser

Trace parse is used to analyze traces collected from the tracing cockpit of AX 2012. It provides insights into long-running pieces of code. It also offers insights into SQL queries.

Here are the Steps

• Run the Trace from the cockpit.
• Do the steps in the application which has performance issues.
• Stop the trace.

• Import the trace into a trace parser for analysis.

For AX 2012 trace parser could be installed from AX 2012 setup 

Similar tool is available to use with the D365FO.

Capture a trace

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/perf-test/trace-trace-tutorial

Using Trace parser .

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/perf-test/trace-parser

Performance monitor

PerfMon is used to set up log collector for AX 2012 and D365 FO environments. The collected logs can then be used in PAL. Users get a report against set benchmarks and thresholds provided for AX 2012 at least.

For AX2012 .

1) Get the threshold file from PAL.

2) Import the xml into a user defined collector set and run the collector.

3 Stop the collector and get the logs collected from the PerfLog folder usually in C drive.

For D365 FO 

Follow the link below.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/perf-test/trace-trace-tutorial

PAL((Performance Analysis of Logs)

The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is powerful. It reads in a performance monitor counter log in any known format. Then, it analyzes the log using complex but known thresholds that are provided. The tool generates an HTML based report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded 

This can be installed from the link below .

https://github.com/clinthuffman/PAL

Import the logs collected via Perfmon and run the analysis report against Dynamics AX .

Here is Part 2