Field monitoring is a special feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that allows you to monitor important fields and track changes made to them. This feature helps you keep sensitive data secure and private, and provides an additional layer of security for your business.
Why do you need field monitoring in Business Central?
- The change logs in Business Central are a treasure trove of information about changes made within your Business Central instance. However, they contain a great deal of data. This can be overwhelming if you are trying to monitor particular issues or if you are trying to watch out for potentially important changes that could put your business at risk, for example someone changing your IBAN number.
- Field monitoring automates the field monitoring process for administrators. This will help them to not only identify problems when they happen, but hopefully give them the data required to pre-empt them.
- Field monitoring can help users and administrators stay in the know about when important data fields are being modified.
How to set up field monitoring in Business Central
To set up field monitoring in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, follow these steps:
- Open the “Monitor Field Change Setup” assisted setup guide. This guide will help you specify the fields that you want to monitor based on filter criteria, such as the data sensitivity classification for the fields.
- In the guide, specify the fields you want to monitor and set the filter criteria. For example, you can choose to monitor fields that contain sensitive data. This could include your bank account numbers, vendor bank account numbers and credit limits. It is important to use this feature conservatively as you could flood your email account with notifications and overuse could potentially affect Business Central’s performance.
- Specify the person who will receive an email notification when a change occurs, and the email account that will send the notification email. Make sure to choose an email account that is not associated with an actual user, as notifications should be sent from an account that is not tied to a specific user.
- After completing the guide, you can manage the settings for field monitoring on the “Field Monitoring Setup” page. This is where you can add or remove fields to monitor and configure other settings related to field monitoring.
- Sign out of Business Central and sign in again to apply your field monitoring settings.
In order to send notifications by email, it is important that you set up the email feature in Business Central. For more information on this, click here.
For more information from Microsoft Learn on Fields Monitoring set up and data sensitivity classification, click here.
Monitoring the field changes
Once field monitoring is set up, you can review any changes in two ways:
- On a case by case basis, you will be able to review the field changes via the email notifications. These emails will include the following:
- Direct link to the Monitored Fields Log Entries
- Details of: the changes made (both original and new values), the user who made the changes, and when they were made.
- A link to Effective Permissions so that you can modify user permissions quickly to prevent further changes from that user.
- You can view the overall changes made to monitored fields on the Monitored Fields Log Entries page. This page will display all the information on fields that have been changed, the original and new values, who made the changes, and when the changes were made. You can also further investigate any change by opening the page where it was made.
It is important to remember that the list of entries on the Monitored Fields Log Entries page will grow over time. Therefore, you must set up a retention policy that will delete entries after a specified period of time.
Field Monitoring Telemetry
Additionally, you can set up Business Central to send field monitoring activity to an Application Insights resource in Microsoft Azure. This allows you to analyse the telemetry data and create reports or set up alerts based on the gathered data.
For more information about Field Monitoring Telemetry, click here.
How we can help you
If you want to know more about Business Central and its many data security features, such as field monitoring, please feel free to contact us to arrange a demo to see how it could be the perfect ERP to help you overcome your business challenges.
