How to find the the root cause of Business Central not being accessible and resolving it - Part 1

Introduction:

In this blog, I will be discussing the approach of handling the Business Central downtime from an End User's perspective.

I will be addressing how to debug and understand what could be a possible source of error which is could be causing the downtime of Business Central Production & Sandbox.

Business Central not accessible

Pre-requisites:

1. Microsoft Dynamics Business Central

2. Access to Business Central Admin Center

3. Access to Office 365 Admin

Procedure:

1. Check if you have a license assigned to your user: If you get the licensing error like the below, you need to confirm if you're getting logged in with the correct user and your license is correct.

Missing License or Invalid User

You can go to home.dynamics.com to verify the user logged in.

Dynamics Home - https://home.dynamics.com   

To be sure if this is not a license issue, kindly contact your Administrator or a friend who has access.
In Tell Me key in 'Users' > Select the User

License is not present in Business Central

At this point, if your Administrator says that there is a License assigned to you in Office then you need to ask them to refresh the User Group Permissions by Navigating to  Actions > Refresh User Group and Action > Update User info from Office 365

Refresh User & Update User info from Office 365

In the end, it all comes to if you actually have the license. This only the Admin can verify in Office 365, Admin.

Go to Admin in Office 365 > User > Active Users > Select the User > License  and Apps

Office 365 Admin > User  License

After providing the License to the User, the Admin should 'Refresh User Group' in Business Central.

2. Check if your app/add-on/extension is installed:

Every time a Sandbox is upgraded, the Add-on / Extension is removed. This means all the role centers, profiles, etc. will be reset to the default one.

3. Check if the session is causing any issues:

I have observed a couple of times that the sessions are not expired. This means that whenever you refresh your Business Central, you may log in to the same session.
In order to make this sure, you can simply login into INCOGNITO mode or PRIVATE mode in your browser and login from home.dynamics.com and then select your environment.

 

INCOGNITO or PRIVATE mode

Also, if you see multiple sessions in Business Central Admin Center, you can cancel the session as well.

Go to Environments > Select your Environment > Manage Sessions > Select your session > Cancel Sessions

Manage Sessions in Admin Center and Cancel previously Logged In sessions

4. Check if your environment is on Upgrade:

It may happen that your Business Central environment in on Upgrade and you may login at the same time.

Unable to Access Business Central during Upgrade

In order to confirm if your environment is on Upgrade, you can head over to Business Central Admin Center.

Business Central is Updating

Conclusion:

These activities might be pretty obvious for someone working in Business Central for more than 6 months but most of the end-users don't know what to do or how to work things out.

I hope this helps in some way or another.