Partner Managed Services

Purpose

ConfigCompare enables Microsoft Dynamics partners and managed service providers to build repeatable services around Configuration Governance.

Partner opportunity

Partners can use ConfigCompare to move beyond reactive support and provide proactive governance.

Typical managed services include:

Drift-as-a-Service.
Release governance.
Upgrade assurance.
Support triage.
Configuration compliance.
Audit evidence preparation.
Golden template governance.
Hypercare monitoring.
Multi-company rollout governance.

Drift-as-a-Service

Drift-as-a-Service is a recurring service in which a partner monitors a customer’s configuration continuously rather than reviewing it on a cycle. Scheduled Snapshots and Scheduled Comparisons run against each environment, and a Ruleset routes results at or above an agreed severity to the partner’s notification group (Chapter 10: Monitoring & Alerts), so an unexpected change reaches the partner without the customer having to report a symptom first.

The partner triages each result against what was expected, such as an approved release or agreed configuration work, and raises anything that cannot be accounted for with the customer directly, while the change is recent enough for whoever made it to explain it. Over time the service also provides analysis and commentary on accumulated Differences, with a recommended action for each: revert, approve retrospectively, or promote to other environments.

Release governance

Release governance uses Snapshots and comparisons to validate whether configuration has moved correctly through DEV, TEST, UAT, GOLD, and PROD.

Upgrade assurance

Upgrade assurance uses pre-upgrade and post-upgrade Snapshots, configuration comparison, and metadata comparison to reduce risk in Microsoft One Version updates or larger upgrade programmes.

Upgrade commentary

AXImprove publishes a curated upgrade commentary for D365 F&SCM releases openly on the AXImprove blog.

Each commentary is produced by running upgrade analysis (Chapter 16: Upgrades) against a Contoso reference environment and cross-referencing the deterministic structural findings with Microsoft’s published release documentation: what technically changed in the schema, mapped to what Microsoft functionally announced. Data initialisation classifications and findings with no published documentation are called out explicitly.

The analysis is based on a Contoso environment; a customer’s own environment will have a different profile. Partners can deliver the same style of curated commentary for customer-specific environments as part of upgrade assurance engagements.

Support triage

Support triage uses same-environment-over-time comparison and environment-to-environment comparison (Chapter 07: Comparison Types) to identify whether a support incident may be caused by Configuration Drift.

Partner differentiation

ConfigCompare gives partners a repeatable basis for governance services beyond implementation and support: the same Snapshots, Rulesets and monitoring operate identically across customers, so a service built once can be operated for many.