Is there any way to pause or disable an environment?

[zerou]

Hello,

We have an old environment that is no longer in use for the most part, but that people sometimes access for old data. The thing is, that environment is using a lot of capacity and data with asyncoperations, and despite creating even custom rules to delete all of that stuff, it keeps pushing us over capacity daily.

So I was wondering if there is any way we can pause or disable the environment doing operations?

[ChrisPiasecki · Accepted solution]

Hi @zerou,

You can place the environment into administration mode with the option to disable asynchronous operations.

---
Please click Accept as Solution if my post answered your question. This will help others find solutions to similar questions. If you like my post and/or find it helpful, please consider giving it a Thumbs Up.

[DeviKrishna · Accepted solution]

Hi @zerou ,

It is a good practice to delete the environment which is no longer in use to gain some capacity.

If you want to prevent the data from growing in capacity at this environment,

Keep in administrator mode. It will restrict users from signing in and also restrict plugin triggers. Only System Admin will be able to login. But it will still hold the data and it won't help to reduce the already grown capacity.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
If I have answered your question, please mark your post as Solved.
If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

My Blog: Dynamics 365 Key Topics – https://d365topicsbydk.com/

My YouTube Channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxSIryP2ah2VpEFr-Z72t1A

Regards
Devi

[zerou]

Hello,

Thank you both for replying. I was able to disable the environment and put it into administration mode. Am I to understand that despite doing that, the data and file usage won't reset after some time?

[ChrisPiasecki]

Hi @zerou,

The data won't be reset. It will restrict access to it so only admins can use it, and background operations won't run and therefore the asyncoperations table won't fill up which was your primary concern.

---
Please click Accept as Solution if my post answered your question. This will help others find solutions to similar questions. If you like my post and/or find it helpful, please consider giving it a Thumbs Up.

[jukka-niiranen]

While the administration mode will stop the asynchronous operations, it may have still side effects that lead to growing consumption of the file capacity. This is because system jobs will keep piling up in the asyncoperation table and the bulk delete jobs won't be running to clean them up.

What causes the system jobs to appear in an environment set in administration mode then? The answer is: solution updates performed by Microsoft. The first-party applications will keep receiving updates, creating data in the asyncoperation table resulting from solution imports. I've blogged about this phenomenon here: Dataverse environment administration mode and storage consumption.

The good thing is that these will be stored on the relatively inexpensive file capacity and not the expensive database capacity of Dataverse. Still, it's important to understand that completely freezing an environment is not possible. You can't stay on the old versions of Microsoft's applications, so at some point also the functionality may change or break, causing problems for users who attempt to access this archive of old data.