The most effective approach I've implemented combines three monitoring levels that catch issues before they become disasters:
Application-level monitoring Your Dynamics 365 environment needs constant health checks beyond Microsoft's built-in tools. We impleent custom monitoring that tracks user response times, database connection pools, and integration endpoint performance. When response times increase by 15% above baseline, alerts trigger before users notice problems.
At a pharmaceutical client, this approach caught a memory leak in their custom inventory module that would have caused a complete system crash during their peak production hours. Instead of six hours of downtime, we had a planned 20-minute restart during lunch break.
Infrastructure-level monitoringCloud infrastructure can fail in ways that don't immediately trigger Microsoft's incident notifications. Network latency, regional service degradation, and capacity constraints can slowly strangle performance before causing outright failures.
I recommend implementing monitoring that tracks:
- Network latency to Microsoft data centers
- CPU and memory utilization trends across your cloud resources
- Database performance metrics including query execution times
- Integration service health for third-party connections
Business process monitoring This is where most companies miss the mark. Technical monitoring tells you when servers are healthy, but business process monitoring tells you when your actual workflows are breaking down.
We set up alerts for business anomalies like:
- Purchase orders stuck in approval workflows longer than usual
- Invoice processing falling below normal completion rates
- User login patterns that suggest access issues
- Data synchronization delays between modules