Setting Up a Batch Job to Run on the Last Day of Every Month

When setting up batch jobs sometimes you want it to run on the last day of every month. There isn't a specific way to do this on the recurrence tab in Dynamics AX unfortunately. However, there is a way, that is undocumented, to trick it into calculating the last day of every month.

On the recurrence form set the following options:

1. Set the Starting time and Starting date.
   
2. Configure the end date.
   
3. Select Months for the Recurring pattern.
   
4. Select the Repeat a specific day by a fixed interval option.
   
   1. Set the field Day to 32.
      
   2. Set the field Per to 1.
      
5. Click OK.
   

This was tried with a leap year and worked successfully.

Tools for Troubleshooting Dynamics AX 2009

Any software of this magnitude requires troubleshooting at one time or another. The one thing that I have found is that Microsoft is pretty much central to troubleshooting any of the issues that you have with this application. This isn't to say that you cannot find additional information elsewhere, but you can be certain that Microsoft has a fix, is working finding a fix or will work on finding a fix once they are aware of the issue. All the resources that I have used thus far to troubleshoot the application are from Microsoft.

Knowledge Bases

• MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/)
• TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com/)
• Microsoft Premier Support (http://premier.microsoft.com/)
• Customer Source (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/us/customersource.aspx)

Community Forums

• Microsoft Dynamics AX

Books

• Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Installation Guide
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Enterprise Portal Administration Guide
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 White Paper: Configuring Kerberos Authentication with Role Centers
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Security Hardening Guide
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Server and Database Administration Guide
• How to Improve Stability of the AOS for Microsoft Dynamics AX (Customer Source – Authentication Required)

Tools

• Event Trace Parser (Customer Source – Authentication Required)
  
  • Installation isn't exactly self-explanatory but once it is setup and you understand it, it is a great tool for troubleshooting slow performance in the application itself.
• PerfMon (Part of the base Microsoft Operating System)
• PAL (Performance Analysis Logs – Used in combination with PerfMon)
• Event Viewer (Part of the base Microsoft Operating System)
• Debugging Tools for Windows
• Log Parser 2.2
  
  • Great for pulling the event viewer logs from multiple servers and then saving them to disk to be opened in Excel to be analyzed.
  • Also great when you are pulling the event logs from a large number of servers to package up to send to Microsoft, rather than connecting to each server and saving them.

Blogs are also a great source of information.  I am refraining from linking to other blogs because I really haven't leveraged any blogs out there at this time.  A lot of the ones I have come across in the past already are centred more on programming than on administration of Dynamics AX 2009.

Blog Focus

As a Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 Administrator I have learned a variety of skills to keep the application up and running through some pretty rough times.  I aim to share my experiences, how I've worked around them and how I plan to continuing maintaining the system going forward.

As it stands, the base setup consists of the following:

• Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 SP1
• Kernel version: 5.0.1500.2250
• Application version: 5.0.1000.52
• One centralized application file folder on a file cluster.
• 11 AOS's
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard
• 8GB of memory
• Some with 4 CPU cores, and some with 8 CPU cores
• A clustered Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1
• Two servers configured with 32GB of memory
• SQL is allocated 28GB of memory
• Two IIS 7 webservers hosting our Enterprise Portal
• A couple customized integrations running through a customized replacement for AIF.
• Atlas xl
• Citrix

That pretty much covers things for now.  I have a few ideas for the next posts which will cover some methods to make gathering information to submit to Microsoft easier.