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Celonis Product Documentation

Connecting to Microsoft Dynamics AX

You can connect your Microsoft Dynamics AX tenant to the Celonis Platform, allowing you to integrate data from Microsoft Dynamics AX. This connection is established via an on-premise uplink connection, requiring an additional configuration between the connection with the Celonis Platform can be established

If you want to extract the SysDatabaseLog table, see: Optional: Extracting the SysDatabaseLog table.

Prerequisites for connecting to Microsoft Dynamics AX

Before connecting your Microsoft Dynamics AX tenant to the Celonis Platform you need to configure the following:

  • An Microsoft Dynamics AX user who has permissions to extract the tables and columns you want to integrate.

  • A configured on-premise uplink connection for your Microsoft Dynamics AX account. For more information, see: On-premise extractors

Optional: Extracting the SysDatabaseLog table

The data extraction from Dynamics AX works like for every other database. However, there is one special case which is the SysDatabaseLog table storing the change log events. As change log tables can grow in size and consume a lot of memory and storage, Microsoft decided to store the relevant columns of this table as a container data type. That means it is encrypted when trying to access the table via Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or JDBC.

As the Celonis Platform can't read directly from the SysDatabaseLog container table, a view needs to be created using the following information:

CREATE View [dbo].[SYSDATABASELOG] as Select

[USERNAME]

,[DESCRIPTION]

,[LOGTYPE]

,MASTER.dbo.Fn_varbintohexstr(DATA) as DATA

,[TABLE_]

,[LOGRECID]

,[CREATEDDATETIME]

,[DEL_CREATEDTIME]

,[CREATEDBY]

,[CREATEDTRANSACTIONID]

,[DATAAREAID]

,[RECVERSION]

,[RECID]

from <Database_Name>.dbo.SYSDATABASELOG

The extraction will create two target tables, one called SysDatabaseLog which will extract the table as is and one called SysDatabaseLog$audit which decrypts the encrypted DATA column into readable strings.

For information about creating a view in Microsoft Dynamics AX, see: Microsoft Learn - How to create a view based on tables.

The next step is to modify your network settings to allow the database extractor to communicate with Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Celonis Platform.

Source system

Target system

Port

Protocol

Description

On-premise extractor server

Microsoft Dynamics AX

Depending on the database, typical ports are 5432 for Postgres and 30015 for HANA for example.

TCP

JDBC connection from on-premise extractor server to the database. The port is the one you normally use to connect to the database.

On-premise extractor server

Celonis Platform

443

TCP

HTTPS connection from on-premise extractor server to Celonis cloud endpoint. The IPs of the Celonis Platform depending on the cloud cluster (which can be seen in the URL).

Celonis Platform IP addresses depending on the cluster

The respective clusters use multiple IPs each, so you need to enable all three of them in your firewall configuration to connect the on-premise extractor server and the cloud endpoint.

For a complete list of inbound and outbound Celonis Platform IP addresses to be allowlisted if needed, see: Allowlisting domain names and IP addresses

Note

This step is only needed if your database is not reachable from the Celonis Platform.

This step is only needed if your database is not reachable from the Celonis Platform.

For more information, see: Setting up

If you would like to use a proxy (optional), see: Proxy settings for on-prem clients.

You can now create the connection between Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Celonis Platform from your data pool diagram:

  1. Click Data Connections.

    data_connections_within_data_pool_diagram.png
  2. Click Add Data Connection and select Connect to Data Source.

    add_data_connection.png
  3. Select On-Premise - Microsoft Dynamics AX.

  4. Configure the following connection details, with the options here depending on your choice of uplinked or direct connection:

    • Name: An internal reference for the data connection.

    • Uplink Connections: The name of the Uplink Extractor Server installed on your end.

    • Configuration type: Select Standard.

    • Host: The database server name or IP address of the database server.

    • Port: The port to connect to the database server.

    • Service Name: If applicable to a specific database type (e.g. Oracle), enter the Service Name (Alias) associated with the database server.

    • Additional Properties: Additional properties like validateCertificate=false.

    • Username and password: The database credentials used by the user.

    • Maximum number of parallel extractions: This is usually governed by the database type you are using. The default value chosen is 4.

    • Timeout for database connections: Timeout for all database connections created in this connection (specific to this connection only). This value will overwrite the local timeout (in application.yaml) in case of uplinked connection.

  5. Click Test Connection and correct any highlighted issues.

  6. Click Save.

    The connection between your Oracle EBS tenant and the Celonis Platform is establised. You can manage this connection at any time by clicking Options:

    managing_data_connections.png