Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to easily check who created an environment, company and record and when

Hi, Readers.
Today I would like to share another mini tip about Business Central, how to easily check who created an environment, company and record and when.
This is a common question in Business Central forum, for example, Solved: Is there a way to see which user created a Company in BC?

We briefly discussed The data structure of Dynamics 365 Business Central before.

A common challenge in many business management applications is tracking the creation, modification, and deletion of records. The same is true for Business Central. Let’s see more details.

Environment: Each environment is an independent database of Business Central. You can create environments of different types in Dynamics 365 Business Center admin center. (Production and Sandbox Environments)

The Operations section of Business Central admin center provides a log of operations that internal administrators and delegated administrators from the partner have made in the Business Central administration center or through the admin center API.

For example,

You can also confirm the details after clicking Status (Complete).

Company: A company is the largest logical structures that is used in a Business Central database. A company may be considered as a sub database. its primary use is to separate and group large sections of data in a database. A company can contain private tables and tables that are shared with other companies.

We can use the page inspection feature to inspect the Audit fields to check who created the company and when.
The page inspection feature enables you to get details about a page, providing insight into the page design, the different elements that comprise the page, and the source behind the data it displays. More details: Inspecting pages in Business Central

Audit fields (APPLIES TO: Business Central 2020 release wave 2 and later): Every table in Business Central includes the following four system fields, which can be used for auditing records:

For example,

But please note that the companies automatically created when the environment is created, such as My Company, do not show the SystemCreatedBy.

Record: A record is a logical structure that is assembled from an arbitrary number of fields. Fields are used to store a single entry in a database. The fields in a record store information about entity properties that are represented by record. Records are organized in tables.

Record and Companies are the same. In fact, Company (2000000006) is also a record of the table. So we can do it using the above method.

That’s all. However, there are more complex approaches.

1. Using Change Log
The change log lets you track all direct modifications a user makes to data in the database. You specify each table and field that you want the system to log, and then you activate the change log. More details: About the Change Log

However, the system table, such as Company (2000000006), cannot be set to change log

2. Using monitoring telemetry
You can set up Business Central to send field monitoring activity to an Application Insights resource in Microsoft Azure. Then, using Azure Monitor, you create reports and set up alerts on the gathered data. For more information, see the following articles in the Business Central Developer and IT Pro help:

• Monitoring and Analyzing Telemetry – Enabling Application Insights
• Analyzing Field Monitoring Telemetry

For example, Power BI app report (beta) on Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry in Azure Application Insights (Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry app)
Environment Changes:

Company Changes:

Field Changes:

3. Using Field Monitoring Setup
You can use the Monitor Field Change Setup assisted setup guide to specify the fields that you want to monitor based on filter criteria, such as the data sensitivity classification for the fields. However, this method can only track changes, and new creations cannot be detected.

Great, give it a try!!!😁

PS:
1. If you want to check the created DateTime of the tenant, the fastest way is to use the Microsoft Teams admin center

2. Monitoring changes in Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 release wave 2 (Change Logs, Field Monitoring and Data audit system fields)

3. Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to check tenant size, environment size, company size and table size (Database storage)

END

Hope this will help.

Thanks for reading.

ZHU