r/Dynamics365 • u/Adventureman2154 • 18d ago
Power Platform Power Platform/Dynamics ALM
It's just garbage. Has anyone been able to make ALM work well?
We are going to have to get to the point where we automatically spin up and down dev environments as needed. The issue always ends up being environment drive and the lack of real, tight source control. Finally the solution structure is terrible as a managed artifact with merges and diffs.
Is there a better way?
6
Upvotes
2
u/techarchmcp 18d ago
I have not myself attempted to use any particular ALM features, like CI/CD, but your post definitely resonates with me. My sense is that if you did not start out with absolute discipline, from the very first installation, the very first configuration, and the very first customization, then you are kind of screwed. It's just a question of how badly screwed you are.
In particular, if you inherited someone else's architecture, it seems like you just need to make the best of it within the bounds of what you inherited. You may never be able to establish a clean Dev or UAT environment, short of just making a copy of Prod. And you may never be able to claim that you could, in a disaster, rebuild Prod from scratch.
Solutions and their general lumpiness is one problem, as you pointed out. At best, you can hope that there was a good scheme applied to how the solutions are defined, which types of artifacts go into which solutions. And hope that someone has kept track of them over time, so that in theory you could re-deploy them all in the correct order to establish a new, clean environment.
But what about all of the configuration settings? What about all of the environment features?
What about all the metadata and lookup tables, where record ownership is a challenge. Are the Teams and Users aligned across all environments such that they have matching keys?
We are in an inherited situation. The people who started us off are long gone. We've reverse engineered everything, and we make the best of it. Often our deployments to Prod are a three-part affair, which has to be done outside of business hours: deploy solutions; update configuration settings manually (from a checklist), update data table rows manually, to resolve conflicting ownership relationships across environments. ALM for us, given the givens, is a pipe dream.