Welcome to my blog! It is the second week in the series of “What's New in Business Central”. Today we will be covering a new feature we've all been waiting for. This is called the “Performance Profiler”.  I am very excited about this feature as this will help Business Central users the ability to provide technical information to their partner or a developer to quickly identify what is causing a possible performance issue on their business central environment.

Quick overview of the Performance Profiler:

if a business process takes longer than expected, your administrator can use the performance profiler page to record a snapshot of the process. When an administrator starts the recording, the profiler monitors all the apps that are involved in the process. This means that it will look and review first party apps for Microsoft, such as the system and base applications, and any third-party apps that you may have installed.

This feature helps identify where a possible holdup is during the process which can make it easier to go to the correct support organization, especially for third party apps, or if you have developers in-house to quickly fix the problem. You can also download the logs out of the performance profiler so you can quickly send it over to your partner, allowing them to immediately go directly to the root problem and have a quicker turnaround time for a resolution.

If we break down the two types of insights after a recorded snapshot, you will identify the active app chart which shows how much faster the process could be if you remove each app. The second insight is for you to have the visibility “Time Spent” chart which shows how many milliseconds each app took to complete its part. This chart is available if you turn on the show technical information toggle.

In addition to the charts, and when you toggle the view technical information, it will provide you two additional fast tabs. The first fast tab is time spent by application object. This fast tab shows the objects, such as codeunits, tables, and pages, that were involved during the process. With this information, you will see two columns, the time spent column which focuses on the object, and shows how long it was active during the recording. The second column, samples, shows the number of times that the profiler sampled the performance of the object.

The second fast tab is called the “Call Tree”. You can also find two columns, self time and total time. The self time column shows the amount of time spent in the method only, and exclude calls out of the method. The total time field is the self time amount plus calls out of the method.

So, as you can see, there are tremendous amount of benefits of utilizing the performance profiler within business central. This tool is invaluable, especially if you have an environment that has plenty of custom extensions as well as third party extensions.

If you have any questions in how to utilize this functionality, please do not hesitate to contact me.