If you have ever used Dynamics 365 solutions in the past, you might have stumbled upon this feature. I just found out about the change in UI and other feature while I was attending one of the Microsoft Airlift training and I accidentally click the shortcut key to open up this feature.
What is the Performance Center?
It is an inbuilt tool that can be used to quickly analyse the performance of your Dynamics 365 or Model-Driven Apps. It will provide you with information to find out the performance of different pages, forms and events so that you can analyse and improve the performance.
Initially, it was only available as part of Dynamics 365, but now the new and improved performance centre can be used with any Model-Driven Apps, even with Dynamics 365 license.
How to open and close the Performance Center?
Well, to open up the Performance Center, we could pass a query parameter or use a shortcut key to open it up. The tricky part is that we can’t close it with any shortcut (that I know of course).
Add “pref=true” query parameter in your url and press enter.
To close the performance centre, we need to refresh/reload the page. Maybe in the near future, Microsoft will provide us with a shortcut key for the same.
Shortcut Key to Open the Performace Center:
In almost all case, we would prefer to use the shortcut key to open the performance centre. Remember to close the performance, you have to refresh the page.
Press “Alt+Shift+Q” to open the performance center. It works on both Chrome and new Chromium Edge.
How to use it?
Well, it pretty simple. On a very basic level, once you have opened the performance centre you can expand it to full screen if you want to deep dive into it.
You can easily look into the various event and code to see the breakdown of the overall page load. You can find out which area is taken the most time and then you can filter it out and deep dive to find out the root cause.
Sometimes, it might be due to custom code written by devs and sometime it might be due to some out-of-the-box feature. For OOB features, you can raise a ticket with MS or check out in the community and for the custom code, devs can analyse and modify it accordingly.
What’s new? Automation 🤔
Well, now the fun part. I found out that MS has included a new feature in the Performance Center, which I am pretty sure was not available in his predecessor. You can design a simple automation event and then you can check out the performance on that. Just to be clear, I am not expert on this, so I am not sure about how to utilize this to the fullest but I am really interested in it.
- First, we can click on “Automation” button.
- Then, we need to select the main category. It contains Page, Create form, Edit form and so on.
- Then we need to select the subcategory which is of course filtered based on our earlier selection. For instance, if we select Edit form category, the list will show edit forms of various entities and we can select one of those.
- Then we need to click on “+” button to add it as a step.
- We need to repeat step 2-4 based on that we want to automate. Then we need to click “Run“. The system will perform the automation and it will store all the logs for us to analyse as well.
I personally think it might not be an alternative to the full-fledged Automated testing, but we can still use it time to time on the client machines to analyse the performance of our system or any new feature at any point to time.
I have tried to automate a set of event in which user will land on Dashboard, navigate to Accounts and create a new account as shown below.
Fun fact, system will create and delete the test record used in the process.
My thoughts:
Well, the bad thing about this is that I was not able to find out the ample amount of resources to explain new features. Frankly, I wasn’t able to find out anything to help me out on this at all. I am not even sure whether there is going to any documentation or enhancement on this anytime soon.
I would recommend to try out this feature and maybe if you stumble upon a relevant article from Microsoft or someone else with more information about this feature, share it with the community.
Till next time, Cheers 😉
