Howdy!
We are considering migrating from a on-prem 2015 to a hosted Dynamics CRM 365. We are using dynamics as a XRM to manage business workflow instead of a classic CRM use case (a.k.a. lotsof customization). My main concern is support ability of a hosted environment, as I am the primary engineer for dynamics at my company and am expected to keep the system up while continuing to extend the platform. With a past hosted environment, I had pretty negative experiences with MS support. It was a absolute nightmare to get resolutions, let alone timely resolutions. Nearly all of our ms support tickets were closed out of frustration or we figured it out on our end after days/weeks of troubleshooting. After trying hard to use MS support we ended up giving up on even opening tickets at all as they were in the way more than they were assisting. Please note this was years ago and I hope does not reflect on today's state of MS support.
Some discussion points all related to a hosted environment:
What does it look like to support a larger hosted production environments where 15 min of down time is quite noticeable?
How have your experiences been with MS support for general issues and for those extra special tricky issues?
Are there good troubleshooting tools for hosted environments that allow good self support or are we forced to use MS support for everything?
Are there things that a hosted environment need to do differently to be self supportable?
Reporting wise if we have complex sql based reports, can Power BI within Dynamics accomplish everything that SQL can?
How would custom index's be applied if at all? Does MS actually do any indexing work?
Performance wise, do we have any visibility on what things we can do to improve performance (such as long running reports query improvement, excessive plugin executions, excessively large system tables, ... )?
Open floor what other support items would admin/dev types be concerned with for migrating then supporting a hosted environment?
Arguments for or against migrating to hosted?
Whats your story success or failure for supporting a hosted environment?
Thank you all ahead of time, I am hoping that this thread can highlight the strengths/weaknesses of having to support a hosted Dynamics CRM environment.
Cheers,
Riley
