What's in a name? Well, depending on the selected region you enter when you sign up for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, your URL will have several different options in the URL. These options are as follows:
- <<organization name>>.crm.dynamics.com
- <<organization name>>.crm4.dynamics.com
- <<organization name>>.crm5.dynamics.com
What does it mean?
Well - the URL that you are assigned is your Microsoft Dynamics data center location. Here is the mapping:
- CRM = United States
- CRM4 = Europe
- CRM5 = Asia
Where is crm2 and crm3, and when do we see crm6 and crm7? Perhaps we'll learn more about that in another blog post. This blog is dedicated to the fact that it IS POSSIBLE to be provisioned in whatever datacenter you like - however that does not mean that you will receive any better performance, and in fact, will probably receive worse just due to the number of hops it takes to get from the data center to you.
The Country/Region setting is the second step when signing up for an organization and is shown below:
When you select the Country/Region, you are presented with options for your Country or Region:
If you select a country in Asia, you'll get the Asian datacenter, in Europe the European datacenter, etc.
On a whim we decided to run a test and provisioned out an organization in EACH of the datacenters to test the performance from our San Francisco headquarters. To run the test, we debated running a series of web traffic capture tools (such as fiddler, etc.), as well a network analyzer (to evaluate hops) and while each of these does have their place, we instead went with the NATIVE diagnostics that are available with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
For those that don't know of these diagnostics, simply go to your URL and add the following to the end of the URL:
tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx
So if your URL is: http://<<organization name>>.crm.dynamics.com
Change it to http://<organization name>>.crm.dynamics.com/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx
The tool looks like this:
Pretty cool, eh? It checks the following:
- Latency Test
- Bandwidth Test
- Browser Info
- IP Address
- JavaScript Array Benchmark
- JavaScript Morph Benchmark
- JavaScript Base64 Benchmark
- JavaScript Dom Benchmark
So there are a couple of options with the Tool (at the bottom), but the big button in the center that says 'Run' pretty much is key component to the tool.
In our case, we ran it on 3 sample Orgs, recently provisioned on each of the data centers from San Francisco, CA, USA with the following results:
Additionally, we ran (non-scientific) searchs and basic lookups and noticed SIGNIFICANT lag when working with anything other than the US data center.
Finally, you can review the log files/results that are run within the diagnostic tools to confirm and further validate the diagnostics.
Hopefully this is helpful when you are troublshooting client performance - but REMEMBER - this is only PART of the equation when evaluating performance with CRM Online - there are other factors such as Office/IE versions, Number of Records, etc. It is my recommendation to use this diagnostics IN COMBINATION with the following:
Finally- We would all love lightening fast speed for our CRM data, however the reality is that we are in a hosted model and there just sometimes things that we can't control - like when it's 5:30 in the evening, you're home and the entire neighborhood decides to jump their Cable modems and start downloading their Netflix episodes of "Breaking Bad"....Netflix now accounts for 25% of North American Internet traffic
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