How to Manage Your Storage Capacity for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps – Part 1

First, let's review the basics of the storage model in Dynamics 365. Depending on your licensing, you may have the legacy or the new storage model. The legacy model gives you a total amount of storage for all types of data, while the new model gives you separate capacities for database, file, and log storage. Database capacity is used to store and manage entity definitions and data. File capacity is used to store attachments, files, photos, and videos. While log capacity is used to record data changes over time for analysis and reporting purposes. You can check your storage consumption and entitlements in the Power Platform Admin Center under Resources -> Capacity. All the documentation on the Dynamics 365 storage model can be reviewed here: New Microsoft Dataverse storage capacity - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Being proactive

One of the key steps to managing your storage capacity is to be proactive and plan ahead. Here are some things you can do to prevent unnecessary storage growth and optimize your usage:

• Develop an environment strategy that aligns with your application lifecycle management (ALM) and business needs. You should have a clear process for requesting, creating, and managing environments, and define the data requirements and capacity allocation for each environment type. For example, you may have development, testing, user acceptance, training, staging, and production environments, each with different data sets and storage limits.
• Establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) to govern and monitor your Power Platform adoption and usage. A CoE can help you set policies and standards, track and analyze your storage consumption trends, and automate alerts and notifications when capacity thresholds are met or exceeded.
• Classify your data according to its type and purpose and define a retention policy for each data category. For example, you may have master, operational, and transactional data, each with different lifecycles and deletion rules. You should also consider any regulatory or legal requirements that may affect your data retention.
• Use the long-term data retention feature (currently in preview) to securely archive your historical application data in a cost-efficient way. This feature allows you to retain the data for audit, legal, and regulatory purposes, and access it for limited inquiry purposes, while reducing your database capacity consumption.
• Review your system settings that may affect your storage consumption. Here are some common examples:
  • You may want to limit the size and number of email attachments. The recommended settings would be limiting emails related to Dynamics records.
  • Reduce the number of alerts logged by server-side synchronization.
  • Disable auditing for non-essential entities and fields.

Conclusion

Managing your storage capacity in Dynamics 365 is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process that requires planning, monitoring, and action. By following the tips and best practices in this blog post, you can optimize your storage usage, avoid capacity issues, and get the most out of your Dynamics 365 applications.
Even if you follow the proactive steps outlined in the previous blog post, you may still encounter situations where you need to react to your storage consumption and reduce it quickly. Check out the next blog post in the series for more information on how to do so.