Dynamics 365 Business Central and “Save as you type” feature: impact on Azure Logic App Consumption

I don’t want to return again on the topic of the impact introduced with the new “Save as you type” Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 feature (we’ve talked a lot here and here and also internally with Microsoft) but I think that there’s another aspect (side effect) that partners and customers need to be aware of.

I think that many of you know that I’m a huge fan of Azure Logic Apps for creating serverless low code integration workflows. Azure Logic Apps have two main models (resource type):

Logic App (Consumption): runs in the multi-tenant Azure Logic Apps or integration service environment (ISE).
Logic App (Standard): runs in single-tenant Azure Logic Apps environment.

Azure Logic Apps have a pricing model based on number of calls. Logic Apps provides two types of pricing plans:

Standard: you pay for allocated resources (fixed price), no extra price for enterprise connectors.
Consumption: you pay per action execution (about $0.000025 per action for every execution) and per enterprise connector action execution (about $0.001 each execution).

As explained in one of my post about this topic, often Azure Logic Apps is cheaper than acquiring Power Automate Premium licenses for integration tasks (and also the best choice).

Imagine to have an Azure Logic App workflow that uses the Dynamics 365 Business Central connector and that starts from the “When a record is changed” trigger. For this quick sample, I’ve created the following stupid workflow:

This workflow reacts on Customer entity changes occurred in a particular Dynamics 365 Business Central environment and do things.

Let’s do the following test: open the Customer Card page, modify a field, wait some seconds and then modify another field, then close the page. Results?

In a Dynamics 365 Business Central version = 21 the workflow is triggered 1 time.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central version 21 the workflow is triggered 2 times:

This happens if a user is slow on modifying fields, otherwise field modifications are collected, but it’s a behaviour that can happen quite often.

And what’s the impact of that?

The main immediate impact is that your Azure Logic App workflow cost can increase a lot! Yes, I know that we’re talking about fractions of dollars ($0.000125 per invocation of Standard connector), but that is. You need to take also this aspect into consideration.

As said yesterday, an hotfix that switches the “Save as you type” feature OFF in existing environments and delivers an option to turn it on/off via Feature Management has now been released in all regions: