Category: Power Automate

All you need to know for migrating your Power Platform environments from one region to another

Geo Migration is a great feature/flexibility offered by Microsoft for customers who wish to move to a region which is in closest proximity to their operations even though initially their Power Platform environment region based out of a different one when they signed up. I checked out online but couldn’t find a good reference blog article yet online, hence this post.

I will make this post detailed but a comprehensive one for anyone to understand the migration. Customers can also opt for Multi Geo for those who have a need to store data in multiple geographies to satisfy their data residency requirements. If you don’t know where your Power Platform environment resides, you can check from Power Platform Admin Center.

If you were not aware yet, Microsoft Azure is the only cloud provider which offers services in more regions when compared to AWS (Amazon Web Services) and GCP (Google Cloud Platform). The Geo Migration feature seamlessly allows customers to move their environments in a single tenant from one region to another. e.g. for Singapore, it is as below.

Important:

  1. Geo Migration is not generally available, so please exercise with caution.
  2. You may reach out to your TAM(Microsoft Technical Account Manager) quoting your request
  3. There were several limitations, see below references for more details.

Mandatory Pre-Migration Check list:

  1. Any Power Apps, Power Automate Flows should be manually exported prior to the migration. Custom Connectors aren’t supported as of now, they must manually reconfigure or created in the new environment. You can export them individually or export them in group.
  2. Canvas Apps, Custom Pages, Code Components like PCF and libraries should be deleted from the environment before your migration activity starts. Else they might be in corrupted state after migration activity.
  3. If any of your Apps are not solution aware because of any reason like App calls a Power Automate when a button is called etc., you may need to explicitly export it out and take the backup.

Post Migration Check list:

  1. After the migration, import all the packages which you have taken backup during pre migration. For those which were not solution aware, import them manually.
  2. If you have Power Portals or Power Virtual Agents, those should be exported explicitly.
  3. Make sure you test all functionalities in order not to impact end users.

Notes:

You don’t need to build Apps and Flows from scratch. Dynamics 365 marketing App is not supported yet. There could be some configuration changes post migration.

While I try to put the information to the best available as per sources from Microsoft, this may change over time and variation could be different as each customer will have different workloads and dependencies with other services, so please read the references carefully before proceeding. Contact Microsoft Support or TAM as necessary.

Hope this helps to get a sneak peek into the migration process.

References:

Where is your data stored?

MultiGeo Architecture

Dynamics 365 & Power Platform new regions

Advance Data Residency Move Program

Geo to Geo Migrations

Cheers,

PMDY

It looks like something went wrong error in Power Automate – Quick Fix

Hi Folks,

While I was working with Power Automate, I encountered this error, FYI, I was using Old Designer UI, hope the fix I found was an easy one but could help someone else without digging deeper and troubleshooting by changing the flow. I tried refreshing the page couple of times as suggested in error message but still the issue remains.

To solve this, just grab the Power Automate URL from your browser search bar…you should see something like below.

Just replace it to

While this could be an intermittent issue, but it persists for few mins or so. So, this tip can help someone.

Cheers,

PMDY

3 ways for error handling in Power Automate

While everything is being automated, we will learn how effective you can handle the errors while you automate the process. Ideally when a failure happens in a Power Automate cloud flow, the default behavior is to stop processing. You might want to handle errors and roll back earlier steps in case of failure. Here are 3 basic first hand rules to consider implementing without second thought.

Run after

The way that errors are handled is by changing the run after settings in the steps in the flow, as shown in the following image.

Screenshot showing the run after settings.

Parallel branches

When using the run after settings, you can have different actions for success and failure by using parallel branches.

Screenshot showing the parallel branch with run after.

Changesets

If your flow needs to perform a series of actions on Dataverse data, and you must ensure that all steps work or none of them work, then you should use a changeset.

Screenshot that shows a changeset in flow.

If you define a changeset, the operations will run in a single transaction. If any of the step’s error, the changes that were made by the prior steps will be rolled back.

Special mentions:

  1. Using Scopes – Try, Catch, Finally
  2. Retry policies – Specify how a request should be handled incase failed.
  3. Verify the Power Automate Audit Logs from Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal
  4. Last but not the least – Check the API Limits for the different actions.

Cheers,

PMDY

Restore your deleted Power Automate Flows – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

Have you or some one in your team accidentally deleted some your flows and want them to be back..? Then this post is for you…

There are the two ways you can restore deleted flows up to 20 days in either way…once after 20 days, even Microsoft Support couldn’t recover your flows.

In this blog post, we will see how you can recover your flows using first approach using Power Automate Management connector which is much simpler.

All you need is a button flow with two Power Automate management connector actions—List Flows as Admin and Restore Deleted Flows as Admin.

So let’s see…

I have a very simple flow as below…

But is has been failing due to some authentication issue, so I have deleted it…

Later I understood the root cause for the authentication issue, I want the flow created to be back. But no problem, you can recover your flow as below…So follow these steps to quickly get your deleted flow back…using an another flow…

Choose a manual trigger…

Next add an action, and choose an operation by searching list flows as admin.

Select your environment in the connector

Save your flow and test it…

Once your flow is successful, verify the outputs..scroll to find out the flow, check for the display name and note down the name associated.

This connector will list down all the flows created in your tenant…when you expand the raw OUTPUTS/value. Note the name which is nothing but the Guid of your flow.

Add Restore Deleted Flows as Admin action and run the flow by searching for the same as below.

Add the Restore Deleted Flows as Admin action from the Power Automate Management Connector.

In the Flow field, enter the name value ie. Guid noted from previous step ie.

9c4be0d4-b54f-4ac3-969e-01154b7f98bb

Save the flow, and test/run it.

You can note your flow is back, you can find out under My Flows but it’s disabled state.

Note:

  • The steps in this article apply to both non-solution and solution flows.
  • Flows that were deleted more than 20 days ago can’t be recovered. Both restore methods (PowerShell script and Power Automate Management connector), as well as Microsoft Support can’t help to restore them.
  • After you restore a flow, it defaults to the disabled state. You must manually enable the flow, per your requirements.

Incase if you were good at Power Shell, you can utilize this approach.

Cheers,

PMDY

Retrigger your Cloud Flow – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

Today I am writing about a simple tip about Power Automate trigger which exists from quite a while but many people might not know it…stop the suspense. Let’s get into the use case…for Power Automate flows running on a trigger..

Are you tired of making the action which triggers your flow each and every time, then you can use this tip..

Just click on Test from top right bar as below..

Then in the pop up menu, select Automatically and check With a recently used trigger.

Later you can select any of the recently successful or failed executions to re-trigger your flow, no more hassles or manual actions to trigger your flow.

Hope this helps some one…trying to re-trigger their Automated cloud flows…without invoking their flow using an actual trigger.

Cheers,

PMDY

Automation Kit for Power Platform – Quick Review

Hi Folks,

Have you ever thought of a tool where you can review all your scheduled flows at once in one dashboard, then I am glad to introduce you the latest capability from Microsoft which is none other than Automation Kit.

If we get into detail, the Automation Kit is set of tools that accelerates the use and support of Power Automate for desktop for automation projects. HEAT is guidance that’s designed to help you deploy the automation platform and manage the entire lifecycle of an automation project.

The key features of this Automation Tool Kit:

  1. The ability to view the schedule of Recurring cloud flows
  2. View schedule by Day, Week, Month and Schedule view
  3. View the status of Scheduled flows (Success, Failure or Scheduled)
  4. View the duration of a Cloud Flow run
  5. View the details any any errors

The key element of the solution is the Power Platform main environment.

There are usually several satellite production environments that run your automation projects. Depending on your environment strategy, these could also be development or test environments.

Between these environments there is a near-real-time synchronization process that includes cloud or desktop flow telemetry, machine and machine group usage, and audit logs. The Power BI dashboard for the Automation Kit displays this information.

Automation Kit components

The Automation Kit supports an automation CoE with the following components:

  1. Automation Project: This project is a canvas app that supports requesting automation projects and submitting them for approval.
  2. Automation Center: This is a model-driven app that organizations can use to create and maintain automation assets, such as master data records, map resources and environments, and assign roles to employees.
  3. Automation Solution Manager: This is a canvas app in satellite environments that enables the metering of solutions and their artifacts.
  4. Cloud flows: These cloud flows use Dataverse tables to sync data from satellite environments, in near real time, to the main environment.
  5. A Power BI dashboard that provides insights and monitors your automation assets.

These two solutions contain the components in the kit.

  • The main solution, which you deploy to the main environment.
  • The satellite solution, which you deploy in each satellite environment.

Limitations:

  1. Only Power Automate Desktop and Power Automate solutions contained within a solution are displayed
  2. At least one Power Automate Desktop has been registered and executed

Reference:

Automation Kit for Power Automate

Automation adoption best practices overview

Learn More

I am glad to help you know about Power Platform Latest Capability…

Cheers,

PMDY

ChatGPT – Insights

Hi Folks,

In this modern era where AI/ML is ruling the world and automating all the possible day to day activities done by a human, in this blog article, let’s talk about the latest buzz word since November 2022. i.e. ChatGPT.

So, what is ChatGPT, why its has become so much popular?

Officially ChatGPT stands for Generative PreTrained Transformer, it’s an AI-powered chatbot created by OpenAI. ChatGPT was fine-tuned on top of GPT-3.5 using supervised learning as well as reinforcement learning using Microsoft’s neural network technology. Open AI’s Chat GPT uses powerful machine learning algorithms to generate coherent and natural-sounding responses for user queries. To some extent, its giving a tough competition to its competitor Google Deep Mind Sparrow. The differences between the two can be found here.

The AI race between Microsoft and Google has definitely been ignited. Microsoft’s recent $10 billion investment into OpenAI, the startup behind their popular Chat GPT chatbot, has increased competition for AI supremacy.

Ok, that’s all the sleek intro. Let’s see how to work on this Chat GPT.

It can be accessed here…

Once you click on the above link, you need login either with your Google or Microsoft credentials. You will be presented with below screen.

In the text box available at the bottom, you can enter your input for ChatGPT to search and get back the result to you.

I have just tried entering how we can integrate Open AI’s ChatGPT and Power Automate and results are pretty much shown in a manner which is easier to understand as below.

The interesting part compared to Power Platform’s Power Virtual Agents is that ChatGPT has the capability to record the previous responses used under the login which is a great enhancement. So with this, the problems can be analyzed and solutions can be generated. By the way, the GPT-3 model, in particular, is 175 billion parameters in size, making it the largest language model ever trained.

In the upcoming blogs, I will try to elaborate how Chat GPT can be used for Power Platform real world scenarios and how we can integrate with Power Automate step by step…. Till then stay tuned…and keep rocking….

Cheers,

PMDY

Power Automate performance improvement considerations

Hi Folks,

Thanks for visiting my blog…in this blog post, have you ever faced the situation where your flow keeps running with no output. Today I will list down the possible scenarios where you were struck with slow performance of the Flow.

Consider the below actions to make your flow execute smoothly.

Remediation steps/Actions to take to make your flow run efficiently:

  1. Understand the throttling limits for your connectors and data sources
  2. Check for Request limits based on user licenses
  3. Cross verify the throughput limits
  4. See the minimum number of actions that the Power Automate service will allow for each plan on the Request limits and allocation page.
  5. Do verify if you were using any on premise connectors
  6. You are hitting the throttling limit in Power Automate
  7. Redesigning your flow to use fewer actions and less data.
  8. Reduce the number of loop iterations for the iteration in ‘Do Until’ and ‘For each item’
  9. Filter your data to retrieve only what is necessary Filtering with Odata
  10. Consider reducing the frequency of scheduled cloud flow
  11. Reduce the file size being accessed if possible if your flow uses them
  12. Consider using Variables for frequently accessed information in your flow
  13. Use Compose and Variable actions to view the data at any time.
  14. Purchasing a Per User or Per Flow license from the pricing page
  15. Per Flow plan may provide best performance quotas available
  16. Enable concurrency control for your ‘Apply to each’ action
  17. Consider creating custom retry policy
  18. Use Select Actions
  19. Check your System jobs in Data verse if asynchronous service performance is normal
  20. Reduce the flow complexity
  21. Consider using Process Advisor for Power Automate.
  22. Verify if you were hitting 2 minute timelimit in dataverse if you were calling Bound or Unbound action in Flow.

Hope this helps someone who’s looking to optimize their flow.

Cheers,

PMDY

Top picks for Power Automate

Power Automate Pagination – Simple approach to retrieve 5000+ records from Dataverse

Hi Folks,

When coming to Power Automate, I see lots of articles regarding Pagination for retrieving more than 5000 records from Dataverse with varying complexity. It could be difficult to understand them at once if you were especially don’t much exposure on Power Automate working with functions and variables.

This post will give you a very easy way to retrieve more than 5k + records from Dataverse using PageNumber variable.

The Flow looks like below..

You just need two variables..

  1. Record count
  2. Page number

Lets create it…

For simplicity, create a manual trigger and initialize the two variables which we need.

Now create a do until loop to run until Page Number is 0.

Now define a Scope action as above to define your fetch criteria to retrieve the records from dataverse with Fetch updated as below

Add the Page Number variable created

Add a condition as above to check if List Rows Length is still greater than zero.

If yes, increment the length of Page Number, else set Page Number as 0.

In each iteration, increment the length variable. Here Residents entity is nothing but contacts.

Just save the flow, run it..you will find the number of records in the table(contact/resident) as below

That’s it, so simple right….

Some other related articles or references below:

Retrieve 5k + records using Pagination using Paging cookie

Retrieve 100k+ records using Skip Token

Hope this helps….someone looking for an easy approach for using pagination with dataverse.

Cheers,

PMDY

Azure API Management(APIM) for Power Platform

Hi Folks,

In today’s world, all the modern software applications use API for the front end to communicate with the backend systems, so lets see as it is very important for every developer working on Azure and API’s. Basically this is a PAAS Service from Azure. Follow along if you would like to know more details on this.

In short APIIM is a hybrid and multi cloud platform used to manage complete API life cycle. Azure API Management is made up of an API gateway, a management plane, and a developer portal.

  • Caching response to improve performance
  • Limit the number of API Calls
  • Security API and providing access
  • Interface to test API calls
  • API Analytics
  • Package related API Services
  • Transforms your API’s without
  • API Gateway is the first point of contact for any requests for your API which will route your requests to the appropriate backends. Imposes additional security restrictions with the help of JWT tokens and other certificates. Responses can be cached so that the API response could be faster.
  • Emits logs, metrics, and traces for monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting
  • API Management are highly configurable, with control over URL mapping, query and path parameters, request and response content, and operation response caching.
  • Groups helps to provide conditional viewing capabilities.
  • Policy can help to change the behavior of an API without any code changes, this is well suited for your production API’s.

Also its easy to integrate API Management with all the other Azure Service available in the market.

Now lets go into the hands on by creating an APIIM simply from Azure.

Go to Home – Microsoft Azure and search for APIIM and select API Management services and click on Create.

Input all the details, it was pretty self explanatory, coming to the pricing tier you could select based on your project needs and use case. Click on Review and Create and then Create.

It will take few minutes for the deployment to complete and you can use it.

The below Power point slide presentation is complete resource which can help you with all your queries related to Azure API Management.

Grand Tour of Azure API Management

grand-tour-of-azure-api-managementDownload

I hope this gives you a bit of introduction to Azure API Management, now lets see how you can use this in your Power Platform Solutions.

For this, once your API ready, all you have do is to export your API’s from Azure API Management to your Power Platform Environment. With this the citizen developers can unleash the capabilities of Azure where the API’s are developed by professional developers. With this capability, citizen developers can use the Power Platform to create and distribute apps that are based on internal and external APIs managed by API Management.

Steps to follow would be as below:

All you need to do is to create a custom connector for your API which can be used in Power Platform like Power Apps, Power Automate etc.

  1. Navigate to your API Management service in the Azure portal.
  2. In the menu, under APIs, select Power Platform.
  3. Select Create a connector.
  4. In the Create a connector window, do the following:
    1. Select an API to publish to the Power Platform.
    2. Select a Power Platform environment to publish the API to.
    3. Enter a display name, which will be used as the name of the custom connector.
    4. Optionally, if the API doesn’t already require a subscription, select Create subscription key connection parameter.
    5. Optionally, if the API is protected by an OAuth 2.0 server, provide details including Client ID, Client secret, Authorization URL, Token URL, and Refresh URL.
  5. Select Create.

Once the connector is created, navigate to your Power Apps or Power Automate environment. You will see the API listed under Data > Custom Connectors.

Custom connector in Power Platform

I hope this will give you a complete picture about API Management in Azure…if you have any further queries, don’t hesitate to comment here…

Cheers,

PMDY