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Microsoft Power Automate is a service allowing makers to create business processes, orchestrations and workflows to help achieve common and even complex business requirements. Within the Power Platform, Power Automate represents one of the most important pillars of the platform. It provides a no to low code solution to process automation. From sending push notifications to mobile devices, to complex robotic process automation flows, Power Automate can be used in virtually any workload.
This purpose of this article is to examine the Power Automate Analytics feature. We will review current functionality and report use cases within the analytics tool. The recently announced unified service health feature will also be referenced here.
The article will also go into the Analytics feature available in the My Flows functionality of Power Automate, which allows Makers the ability to track metrics on their flows.
Power Automate Analytics
Power Automate Analytics in the Power Platform Admin Center
The Power Automate Analytics feature in the Power Platform Admin Center
The data in these reports is refreshed about every 3 hours and is retained for 28 days. To find the last refresh date, look in the upper right hand corner of the Analytics window.
NOTE: This image, along with all images in this article may appear blurry. Click on the image for an expanded clear image.
Who can access this data?
As shown in this article there consist of various admin roles within Office 365 that will scope to specific reports. Environment Admin will scope to environments the admin has access to while other admin roles will expose every environment.
Navigating the Portal
With the appropriate permissions, an admin will land on the Usage report for Power Apps Analytics.
Power Automate Reports
The Runs report displays daily, weekly and monthly runs for all flows in a specific environment. This can prove useful to understanding if a new or existing flow introduced has been causing a spike in usage. or instance if I had a reoccurring integration utilizing flows I may come here to see a daily count. If I see a spike in failed or cancelled runs, I can move to the Errors report for additional information.
The Usage report shows the current flows in use and the overall trends of flows. Admins can also see how flows are triggered, such as system events like a CDS update to a scheduled task or button click.
The Flows in use chart can help see track the most triggered flow in the filtered data. In my scenario, I had an unusual number of daily flows from the Runs report and was able to isolate to the specific flow causing the increase. In the chart the "Get D365 Msgs and Fire Pipeline" flow which monitors the Office 365 Communications API for current health and messages. A sample of this flow is located here. Further analysis of the capabilities of the Office 365 Service and Communications API are covered in another article related to overall service health.
The Created report displays the types of flows created, trends and specific details about created flows such as the created date and email.
The Errors report, will provide data points for recurring error counts and the creator's email address and the last time it occurred.
The Shared report is important to understand which flows are shared and which are trending up in shares. This is useful for an analysis on flows that have have become extremely valuable to your organization where users are requesting and sharing often. This could also help call out when a flow may need to be reviewed for possible security and performance considerations.
Finally, the Connectors report let's admins examine the various connectors used within Power Automate flows. Metrics such as most used connectors, which ones are used across different flows, and number of connector calls are available in this report. By choosing a specific connector, admins can drill down to find how many times a flow ran and compare this to the number of connector calls. This can help determine which flows are using a specific connector more than others and could possibly be tuned to be less chatty.
Filtering the data returned
The filters for Power Automate Analytics show environments an admin has access to review data for. During acceptance or end to end testing, admins may want to focus on a specific environment and time range. To do this, click the "Change filters" button for any dashboard.
Export data for Analysis
Currently the ability to export from the Power Platform Admin Center is not available as it is with the Common Data Service for Analytics. I would expect this to change and will update this article once more information is available. Until then most charts can be exported via the ellipsis like other Microsoft Power BI reports.
Service Health within the Power Platform Admin Center
Recently announced in the Release Wave 1 for 2020 is a unified service health experience within the Power Platform Admin Center. This will allow admins the ability to focus efforts within the Power Platform Admin Center, not having to navigate to the Office 365 Portal for service health. This reduces Environment Admins from potentially interacting with Office 365 items and to focus on the Power Platform specifically. According to the article the ability to set up alerts for service outages will be coming as part of the September 2020 general availability.
My Flow Analytics
Announced in 2017, Microsoft Flows Analytics today are useful for makers who want to review the flows created in the My Flows area of the Maker Portal. The analytics data can be reviewed for the past 7, 14 or up to 30 days. To view these analytics, navigate to the My Flows area and select a flow.
Once the Overview window opens, in the toolbar click the Analytics button.
The Usage report shows total runs by day, number of runs and trending flow runs.
The Errors report shows errors by day, errors by type and error details which can all be filtered by a specific action in you flow.
Next Steps
Power Automate Analytics is a powerful tool enabling administrators to view a wealth of information across environments for the Power Automate platform. These analytics can show trends and alert for issues that need further investigation. Continuing this series, we will examine further tools and mechanisms that help us better understand both user activity and how to monitor and troubleshoot individual flow runs.
If you are interested in learning more about specialized guidance and training for monitoring or other areas of the Power Platform, which includes a monitoring workshop, please contact your Technical Account Manager or Microsoft representative for further details.
Your feedback is extremely valuable so please leave a comment below and I'll be happy to help where I can! Also, if you find any inconsistencies, omissions or have suggestions, please go here to submit a new issue.
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