Power Automate can save Admins a TON of time! Are you wondering how you can leverage its power to automate and simplify your work? Watch the video!
Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Power Automate Analytics: Metrics available in the Power Platform admin center include maker activity, flow inventory, and error reports. Analytics for Power Apps and Dataverse are also available.
- Tenant-Level Analytics: These can be enabled or disabled. They aggregate data from all environments and copy it to the default environment, which might not suit organizations with strict data residency requirements.
- Environment-Specific Analytics: Analytics can be filtered by environment, type, and region, helping monitor specific environments and understand flow performance and errors.
- User and Flow Details: Detailed information about flows, including creation and publication dates, user IDs, and environment names, is provided to help track and manage flows effectively.
- Licensing Attention: A report on environments requiring licensing attention is included. Ideally, this report should show zero issues, indicating all users have the necessary licenses.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Let’s start by talking about the Power Automate analytics inside the Power Platform admin center. Power Automate offers many metrics available in the admin center, both for tenant-wide analytics as well as per environment analytics. In the Power Platform admin center, you have analytics on Power Automate usage. You can view the maker activity and how many flows were created, the inventory of your flows, a report on flow errors, as well as the most common connectors inside your tenant. Given the Power Platform admin center, you also have reports on other Power Platform components such as Power Apps and Dataverse. Another report that you have available for you in the admin center is a summary of environments that require licensing attention, which can be very useful for managed environments to make sure that everybody that’s been added to a managed environment can run the apps and flows that have been shared with them.
Before we go into the demo, I also wanted to talk about tenant-level analytics, which you can choose to enable or disable. Now, you might ask yourself, why would I ever want to disable tenant-level analytics? The way that tenant-level analytics work is that the Power Platform will aggregate data from all the environments and copy it to the default environment. A good example of why an organization might not want tenant analytics is, let’s say we have a company with an HQ and default environment in the United States, but they also have branch offices in the European Union and Australia, and they have a legal requirement for all of the data to remain in the respective regions. So, they created an environment based in the EU, they have an environment based in Australia, and all of the flows and the apps for those environments remain in that geographical region. In this scenario, copying even some analytics data over to the default environment, which is in the US, might go against their legal requirements. Of course, this is a scenario, and you should always talk to your legal team, but this is a scenario that I have seen before in which an organization I was working with actually disabled tenant-level analytics.
Now that we have seen the theory, let’s head over to the lab and check out the analytics from the Power Platform admin center in action. We’re back in the live environment. Let me open up the browser here where I’m in the Power Platform admin center. To get to the analytics, on the left side, we have a category for analytics in which we have analytics for Dataverse, for Power Automate, and for Power Apps. In this course, we are only interested in Power Automate, but of course, if you’re a Power Platform admin, you have access to all of them. Now, this is a demo environment, so there’s only a little activity going on. In your environment, you will have much more, but remember, if ever you try this in a demo environment to learn like I’m doing right now, there might be a 48 to 72-hour delay from the moment that you have a bunch of flows running your test until it will be visible in the analytics. So, don’t stress if you run a bunch of flows and you don’t see it right away; it takes a bit of time.
By default, if I have my tenant analytics enabled, I have the overview, which again is tenant-wide. I can see the total flows, total runs, successful runs, failed runs, and how many environments. I can also filter by environment if I want to. I can filter by type of environment if I want to, as well as per region. You can see right now it even gives me the name of the flow, the marketing news feed that we have actually used as an example earlier in this course. Great! I can also go and check out the maker activity, so I can see how many flows have been created, how many flows are active, and so on. For users, it will show the ID of the user, so if ever you want to know who that is, you can always check in with this ID in Entro ID and find out who that user is. Of course, as a Power Platform admin, we don’t necessarily have this information, so we might need to work with our identity administrator in order to get that. I can see the name of the flows here, when they got created, when they got published, and more, as well as the name of the environment. So, I know name and flow name might be a bit confusing, but flow name is the name of the flow, and name is the name of the environment. I can also see the inventory of my flows as well, and again, we will have a bunch of filters. I can see the ones that have been last used less than 30 days ago, and really, I have all the inventory of my flows. Again, if I want to, I can filter just on one single environment.
Now, we can also go to the environment view tab. This will be by default filtered on a single environment. Right now, it shows my Global Mantics Org IT Department Preview Features environment. I don’t have a lot of activity in that one. Let me go to my default environment, and then I can decide if I want to look at analytics for the last 28 days, 14 days, or only 7 days. Let’s keep it to 28 days, click on apply, and let’s take a look at the results. You can see here I had one successful run on September 12, and then on September 29, I had one successful run, but I had some that did fail. So, maybe as an admin, if I see a high failure rate on a certain day, I might want to know what happened. Is it because a third-party system we’re connecting to went down? Is it a user that did a bunch of tests? We can always deep dive into the report. A lot of the times with PowerShell, it might be a bit easier, and don’t worry, right after we finish this demo, we will go learn how to do it with PowerShell as well.
Then, I can go under usage, and something that I wanted to show you on the last one, I’ll show it to you on this one. On the environment view report, you have different tabs for cloud flows and desktop flows, so they separated them so you can really get analytics for each type of flow. I can see what are the types of cloud flows in use. It’s a type of button click, so that is the trigger. I can see the name of the flow, I can see the errors that I had inside my flows. As an example, you can see a lot of them were unauthorized, as well as the connectors that I’m using inside my flows. Something that we have talked about in the slides was all about tenant analytics, which is this overview tab over here. By the way, if you don’t have tenant analytics enabled, this will not load. This report will instead give you an error that says, “Hey, tenant analytics is not enabled. You cannot view this report.” So, go here to enable it, and where it will bring you is under settings over here, and then we have a category for analytics, which is the tenant-level analytics. You have an explanation in the terms of service, and very important is at the top here, this feature aggregates data from environments across all regions in your tenant and copies it into the default environment region for tenant-level reporting. So, you might want that on, you might not want that on. That is up to you. Of course, if you have a regulatory requirement where this cannot work, but you have other systems where you can store data, you can always use PowerShell to get that information from all your environments and then copy it into a custom database of your choice with your custom Power BI reporting. You can, of course, do that.
Okay, the last thing I want to show you in the admin center is the licenses. Now, what I will do is include standard environments here. This is the only analytic really where you want to have zero that shows up because those are the environments that require licensing attention. It means that a user that is part of one of those environments doesn’t have the required licensing to use the flows and apps in there. So, seeing zero like I do now is the best thing you can see, but if not, if ever you have any, you’ll see the name of the environment and the license issues they have at the bottom of the table over here. Great! This is it for the Power Automate analytics inside the admin center. Now that we’ve been talking a bit about PowerShell, let’s head back to the slides and see how we can use PowerShell to create our own reports.
