Give me Dynamics 365 Business Central Capacity in a Power BI mini-chart

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 20:40:00 +0000

This is another BC Admin API with Power Automate guide. Actually the first one I did but didn’t blog about it. Here are all the steps!

Requirement

I would like to see the capacity of my D365 BC Environments as a chart over time that I can display on my intranet site.

Solution Elements

Dynamics 365 Business Central API - Business Central Administration Center API - Business Central | Microsoft Learn
Entra ID App registration for API OAuth authentication - Dynamics 365 Business Central - OAuth 2.0 APIs with Insomnia
Power Automate Flow - Microsoft Power Automate
SharePoint List - Introduction to lists - Microsoft Support
Power BI - Power BI

How to

Get things ready

The D365 BC Admin API we will use for this, is this one Get used storage for all environments.

The end point is quite simple, nothing dynamic:

https://api.businesscentral.dynamics.com

/admin/v2.21/environments/usedstorage

To access this API we need to have an Entra ID App Registration available to us, that has the AdminCenter.ReadWrite.All permission granted.

An App Registration showing the API Permissions

We will use this App Registration to get an OAuth token and then use that to call the GET /usedstorage API.

The parts you need from the app registration are:

OAuth 2.0 token endpoint

App Registration Client ID

Client Secret Value

If you didn’t make a note of the Secret Value when you created it. Just create another secret and note down the Value.

We also need to make one more change to the D365 BC configuration, in the BC Admin Center visit the Microsoft Entra App section, click to Authorise an new Entra App and paste the App Reg Client ID value.

In this example my App Reg above is already showing…

SharePoint List

Create a new list

We just need 2 columns for this simple list

Name of the Environment [text]
Usage size [decimal]

SharePoint will save the date the row was created so we don’t need a separate column for that

I used the ‘Title’ column to hold the Environment Name and added 1 extra column for the usage size data

Power Automate

Lets create the flow, here is the outline:

Recurrence

How often will your flow run?

Sets the flow to run once per day

Try

This is a scope that will work together with the Catch scope for error handling. There are no settings for this scope.

HTTP (Gimme Token)

URI = <OAuth 2.0 Token endpoint from your App registration>
Method = POST
Headers

Content-Type = application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Body

grant_type=client_credentials
&client_id=<your app registration ID>
&client_secret=<your API secret value>
&scope=https://api.businesscentral.dynamics.com/.default

[1] The OAuth 2.0 Token endpoint. [2] The App Reg Client ID and Secret Value.

Parse JSON (Token)

Use the parse action to make the token that gets sent back available for use later in the flow as a separate selectable output from this step

{
    “type”: “object”,
    “properties”: {
        “token_type”: {
            “type”: “string”
        },
        “expires_in”: {
            “type”: “integer”
        },
        “ext_expires_in”: {
            “type”: “integer”
        },
        “access_token”: {
            “type”: “string”
        }
    }
}

HTTP (Gimme Data)

Send the main request that will GET the used storage for all your environment.

Headers
Authorisation = <the token from the previous step - click the lightning and pick from the list>
Content-Type = applicaion/json

Paste JSON (Data)

Parse the data so we can extract the rows & columns of data returned

{
    “type”: “object”,
    “properties”: {
        “value”: {
            “type”: “array”,
            “items”: {
                “type”: “object”,
                “properties”: {
                    “databaseStorageInKilobytes”: {
                        “type”: “integer”
                    },
                    “applicationFamily”: {
                        “type”: “string”
                    },
                    “environmentType”: {
                        “type”: “string”
                    },
                    “environmentName”: {
                        “type”: “string”
                    }
                },
                “required”: [
                    “databaseStorageInKilobytes”,
                    “applicationFamily”,
                    “environmentType”,
                    “environmentName”
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}

For Each

The for each loop will then apply the action of ‘Create Item’ i.e. add a row to the SharePoint list we define

Create item

In this action we define which list to use and which values go into which field.

Test the flow to check some data is getting created, you can always clean down the SharePoint List

Create a Power BI report

The fastest way to get something cool is use the Integrate > Power BI > Visualise Acton in SharePoint:

This will give you a few different visuals that you can adapt. These reports are linked to the SharePoint list.

You can also pull the data into a desktop Power BI and create that way.

Here is what I created in the end.

This report I can publish to my Power BI portal workspace and from there surface in BC or SharePoint etc.

BC Capacity mini-chart surfaced on a SharePoint page

BC Capacity mini-chart surfaced in a BC role center.

Give me a fresh sandbox copy of my D365 BC production environment each night

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 20:40:00 +0000

Me: "What features do you really not want to lose from your current system"

Them: "We really like the copy of production that gets generated each night. We can test & train in a system that's up-to-date to the day before with everything"

This was part of a conversation with a company looking to migrate from NAV on-prem. Good old SQL Server Agent you could have that do so much! Thankfully, we have Power Automate to pickup these kind of things now.

Admin Api on Wingate365