Automate Performance Profiling in Business Central 2024 Wave 2

For some time now, we have been able to use the Performance Profiler, or InClient Profiler, in Business Central when we need to troubleshoot performance issues.

This tool is easy to use by almost any user and can help us get closer to various performance issues. With Business Central 2024 Wave, we now have the ability to schedule this profiling action instead of manually triggering it.

So what’s the deal? In my experience, when a customer reports poor performance, we always advise them to use the profiler first. Performance issues are often very, let us say, subjective, not every user has the same opinion when performance is bad or not.

So we told the customer how to use it and that we need the results and the .alcpu file. Often it happens that when the customer uses the profiler, nothing suspicious is shown. Performance looks good, no indication of long running sequences, and even the customer says it was fine.

A few days later, same customer, same call… you know what I mean.
So let’s just schedule the profiler and let it do its job automatically in the background. Let me show you:

Open the page and click New:

Pretty simple setup. By default, the only thing you have to do is define a description. That’s it. It is automatically enabled for the next hour for the user who creates the new schedule.

So let’s keep it that way, we’ll call it “General Performance” and close the page.

After that you will see the entry and profiling is enabled:

And now what? Nothing… I mean, the user has nothing else to do but his regular activities in Business Central. In this case, everything will be analyzed with the profiler for the next hour. Let’s see, and some random clicks in the system. Then we open the profile and look at the log:

Pretty much what I did. Opened a sales order, released it, and converted a sales quote to an order. And for each entry we can open the detailed analysis by pressing “Open Profile”:

And these are the same results we would get if the user started it manually. You can analyze the result here, or you can download the .alcpu file and take a closer look at it in Visual Studio Code.

So the next time a customer reports performance problems, instead of telling them to manually run the Performance Profiler and record a task, you might want to turn on scheduling for a period of time and let the system do its job.

For me personally, this is a really nice new feature – I am really looking forward to using it.

As always, a short video how to use it: