Maximizing Your Power Platform Solution’s Reach: Essential Performance Considerations for Optimal Efficiency

Hi Folks,

This blog post is all about performance considerations for your Power Platform CE Projects and how you can plan to optimize application performance for your Power Apps. So I just want to take you through them…

Are you tired of creating solutions for longer durations and while at the end of the project or during UAT you end up facing performance issues for the solutions you have developed, one of the most important non-functional requirements for a project’s success is Performance. Satisfying performance requirements for your users can be a challenge. Poor performance may cause failures in user adoption of the system and lead to project failure, so you might need to be careful for every decision you take while you design your solutions in the below stages.

Let’s talk about them one by one..

1. Network Latency and bandwidth

A main cause of poor performance of Dynamics 365 apps is the latency of the network over which the clients connect to the organization. 

  • Bandwidth is the width or capacity of a specific communications channel.
  • Latency is the time required for a signal to travel from one point on a network to another and is a fixed cost between two points. And usually many of these “signals” travel for a single request.

Lower latencies (measured in milliseconds) generally provide better levels of performance. Even if the latency of a network connection is low, bandwidth can become a performance degradation factor if there are many resources sharing the network connection, for example, to download large files or send and receive email.

Dynamics 365 apps are designed to work best over networks that have the following elements: 

  • Bandwidth greater than 50 KBps (400 kbps)
  • Latency under 150 ms

These values are recommendations and don’t guarantee satisfactory performance. The recommended values are based on systems using out-of-the box forms that aren’t customized.

If you significantly customize the out-of-box forms, it is recommend that you test the form response to understand bandwidth needs.   

You can use the diagnostics tool to determine the latency and bandwidth:

  1. On your computer or device, start a web browser, and sign in to an organization.
  2. Enter the following URL, https://myorg.crm.dynamics.com/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx, where crm.dynamics.com is the URL of your organization.
  3. Click Run.

Also, to mitigate higher natural latency for global rollouts, customers should leverage Dynamics 365 Apps successfully by having smart design for their applications. 

2.Smart Design for your application

Form design 

  • Keep the number of fields to a minimum. The more fields you have in a form, the more data that needs to be transferred over the internet or intranet to view each record. Think about the interaction the user will have with the form and the amount of data that must be displayed within it.
  • Avoid including unnecessary JavaScript web resource libraries. The more scripts you add to the form, the more time it will take to download them. Usually, scripts are cached in your browser after they are loaded the first time, but the performance the first time a form is viewed often creates a significant impression.
  • Avoid loading all scripts in the Onload event. If you have code that only supports OnChange events for fields or the OnSave event, make sure to set the script library with the event handler for those events instead of the OnLoad event. This way loading those libraries can be deferred and increase performance when the form loads.
  • Use tab events to defer loading web resources. Any code that is required to support web resources or IFRAMEs within collapsed tabs can use event handlers for the TabStateChange event and reduce code that might otherwise have to occur in the OnLoad event.
  • Set default visibility options. Avoid using form scripts in the OnLoad event that hide form elements. Instead set the default visibility options for form elements that might be hidden to not be visible by default when the form loads. Then, use scripts in the OnLoad event to show those form elements you want to display. If the form elements are never made visible, they should be removed from the form rather than hidden.
  • Watch out for synchronous web requests as they can cause severe performance issues. Consider moving to asynchronous for some of these web requests. Also, choose WebApi over of creating Xml HTTP Requests (XHR) on your own. 
  • Avoid opening a new tab or window and do open the window in the main form dialog. 
  • For Command Bar, keep the number of controls to a minimum. Within the command bar or the ribbon for the form, evaluate what controls are necessary and hide any that you don’t need. Every control that is displayed increases resources that need to be downloaded to the browser. Use asynchronous network requests in Custom Rules When using custom rules that make network requests in Unified Interface, use asynchronous rule evaluation.

Learn more Design forms for performance in model-driven apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

Latest version of SDK and APIs 

The latest version of SDK, Form API and WebAPI endpoints should be used to support latest product features, roadmap alignment and security. 

APIs calls and custom FetchXML call velocity 

Only the columns required for information or action should be included in API calls: 

  • Retrieving all columns (*) creates significant overhead on the database engine when distributed across significant user load. Optimization of call velocity is key to avoid “chatty” forms that unnecessarily make repeated calls for the same information in a single interaction.
  • You should avoid retrieving all columns in a query result because of the impact on a subsequent update of records. In an update, this will set all field values, even if they are unchanged, and often triggers cascaded updates to child records. Leverage the most efficient connection mechanism (WebAPI vs SDK) and reference this doc site for guidance on the appropriate approach.

Consider reviewing periodically the Best practices and guidance when coding for Microsoft Dataverse – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn and ColumnSet.AllColumns Property (Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query) | Microsoft Learn.

Error handling across all code-based events 

You should continue to use the ITracingService.Trace to write to the Plug-in Trace Log table when needed. If your plug-in code uses the ILogger interface and the organization does not have Application Insights integration enabled, nothing will be written. So, it is important to continue to use the ITracingService Trace method in your plug-ins. Plug-in trace logs continue to be an important way to capture data while developing and debugging plug-ins, but they were never intended to provide telemetry data.  

For organizations using Application Insights, you should use ILogger because it will allow for telemetry about what happens within a plug-in to be integrated with the larger scope of data captured with the Application Insights integration. The Application Insights integration will tell you when a plug-in executes, how long it takes to run and whether it makes any external http requests. Learn more about tracing in plugins Logging and tracing (Microsoft Dataverse) – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn.   

Use Solution Checker to analyze solution components 

Best practice is to run Solution Checker for all application code and include it as mandatory step while you design solutions or check when you complete developing your custom logic.

Quick Find 

For an optimal search experience for your users consider the next:

  • All columns you expect to return results in a quick find search need to be included in the view or your results will not load as expected.
  • It is recommended to not use option sets in quick find columns. Try using the view filtering for these. 
  • Minimize the number of fields used and avoid using composite fields as searchable columns. E.g., use first and last name as searchable vs full name.
  • Avoid using multiple lines of text fields as search or find columns.
  • Evaluate Dataverse search vs using leading wildcard search

3. Training

This step should be done during user training or during UAT. To ensure optimal performance of Dynamics 365, ensure that users are properly leveraging browser caching. Without caching, users can experience cold loads which have lower performance than partially (or fully) warm loads.

 Make sure to train users to: 

  • Use application inline refresh over browser refresh (should not use F5)
  • Use application inline back button instead browser’s back button.
  • Avoid InPrivate/Incognito modes in browser which causes cold loads.
  • Make users aware that running applications which consumes lot of bandwidth (like video streaming) may affect performance.
  • Do not install browser extensions unless they are necessary (this might be also blocked via policy)
  • Do use ‘Record Set’ to navigate records quickly without switching from form back to the list. 

4. Testing

For business processes where performance is critical or processes having complex customizations with very high volumes, it is strongly recommended to plan for performance testing. Consider reviewing the below technical talk series describing important performance considerations, as well as sharing practical examples of how to set up and execute performance testing, and analyze and mitigate performance issues. Reference: Performance Testing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 TechTalk Series – Microsoft Dynamics Blog

5. Monitoring

You should define a monitoring strategy and might consider using any of the below tools based on your convenience.

  1. Monitor Dynamic 365 connectivity from remote locations continuously using network monitoring tools like Azure Network Performance Monitor or 3rd party tools. These tools help identify any network related problems proactively and drastically reduce troubleshooting time of any potential issue. 
  2. Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, is widely used within the enterprise landscape for monitoring and diagnostics. Data that has already been collected from a specific tenant or environment is pushed to your own Application Insights environment. The data is stored in Azure Monitor logs by Application Insights, and visualized in Performance and Failures panels under Investigate on the left pane. The data is exported to your Application Insights environment in the standard schema defined by Application Insights. The support, developer, and admin personas can use this feature to triage and resolve Telemetry events for Microsoft Dataverse – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
  3. Dataverse and PowerApps analytics in the Power Platform Admin Centre. Through the Plug-in dashboard in the Power Platform Admin Center you can view metrics such as average execution time, failures, most active plug-ins, and more.
  4. Dynamics 365 apps include a basic diagnostic tool that analyzes the client-to-organization connectivity and produces a report.
  5. Monitor is a tool that offers makers the ability to view a stream of events from a user’s session to diagnose and troubleshoot problems. Works both for model driven apps and canvas apps. 

I hope this blog post had helped you learn or know something new…thank you for reading…

Cheers,

PMDY

Power Platform Pipelines to Deploy Managed Solutions

Hi Folks,

As you all know Application Life Cycle Management(ALM) is very important for a project to become successful in this automation era. The faster is the iteration speed to deploy your solution to production, the more healthy your project is and so your stakeholders. This kind of Automation is usually made possible with the help of CI/CD Azure Pipelines. CI/CD for GIT Repo for Azure DevOps is famous from quite some time. You might have heard that Microsoft had got this kind of CI/CD architecture to Power Platform released in Preview last year and is now Generally Available(GA).

But if you still don’t really have a hands on and pretty new to get this into your project, then this blog post is for you. You don’t need to know Azure DevOps or at least you don’t need to be technical to use this new capability, even administrators can. All you need is to just follow along….You can download the presenation I had presented at Singapore User Group here…

First of all, let’s see what are the prerequisites to create a Power Platform Pipeline.

  • Four environments are recommended, but you can use as few as three environments to create a pipeline.
  • Dataverse database is a must in all the environments except the Host Environment.
  • Dataverse for Teams environments aren’t supported for use with pipelines.
  • You must have a Power Platform administrator or system administrator role.
  • Pipelines are a feature of Managed Environments. As such, the development and target environments used in a pipeline must be enabled as a managed environment. Standalone licenses won’t be required when you use developer or trial environments with pipelines. More information: Managed Environments.
  • If you want to share these pipelines, you should grant access by opening the security from the host environment. The Deployment Pipeline User security role grants access to run one or more pipelines.

Now let’s see how you can set up Power Pipelines…

You need to identify which of your environments you want to configure pipeline for. For a healthy pipeline, at least you need 3 environments ie. Dev, Test, Prod, however there is no upper cap.

So for configuring our pipeline, we need one more environment in addition to above which is nothing but Host Environment which serves as the environment which stores all the configuration of the pipeline.

So below are our environments we will be using in this tutorial…

Host Environment(Required)

Development Environment (Required)

QA Environment(Optional)

Production Environment(Required)

You can navigate to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ to create an environment with Dataverse database or follow this.

First thing, you have to do is to set up the host environment which holds the configuration of your pipeline. The configuration is pretty much easy and intuitive to follow. Make sure you choose same region to all your environments and select type as Production for all environments except developer environment. You don’t actually need to create a database as this stores only the configuration.

In the same way, I have already created the host environment and I also have few trials which I will be one of them as my test environment and one as my Developer environment, we can also configure other environment but for brevity I am leaving one not configured. Make sure to check Create database for this environment while you were creating for all the environments except the Host Environment.

For setting up the pipeline, you need to have the Environment Id’s of the environments which you would like to configure ready. Follow this link if you don’t know how you can get them.

Copy and paste them in a notepad for your quick reference during configuration.

Open the host environment from Admin portal and click on Resources Option available and click on Dynamics 365 apps.

In the next window, click on Install app and in the list of apps, choose Power Platform Pipelines, click on Next and install the app after agreeing the terms of service.

Now you need to open the host environment from https://make.powerapps.com to configure the pipeline and you should an app for Deployment Pipeline Configuration as below.

Before moving further let’s understand the table structure used for the pipeline.

Open this app as below and configure the environments which you want to use in your pipeline, set up the Development environment from where you would like to deploy the changes to your target. Make sure you select Environment Type as Development Environment and provide the respect Environment Id which you copied to your notepad earlier as above.

Similarly configure the other target environments, but proceed to select as Target Environment as the environment type. Once after system validation is done, validation status is shown as successful and the environments setup will look as below.

Now you need to create a pipeline for the configured environments, once saved, link the development environment which you configured above.

Next is configure your target environments for the pipeline to which you would like to deploy your solutions, from the quick create, give a name, choose your Previous Deployment Stage lookup and select the target environment you would like to Deploy from the lookup.

Once setup, your power pipeline should look something as below.

Note: While you are configuring the first stage to deploy to Test environment, you need leave the Previous Deployment Stage as empty.

Now go back to your Development environment, include any power platform component which you would like to deploy to next environment, here for simplicity I added one Canvas App to the solution as below.

The Canvas App component added and as soon as you select or even before you should see a Pipeline symbol as highlighted below….

Note: This icon will be appeared if you have setup everything correctly, if you still don’t see this option when you try to deploy component from Dev, then you need relook at your configuration which you have setup in the host environment, either you gave the wrong environment Id or you configured incorrectly.

Once this icon is being shown, you are set to go…once you click on the Pipeline symbol, it takes you to a new screen showing your pipeline as below

All you need to just click on Deploy here and wait for a couple of mins to Deploy the solution to next environment to Test and you should see below screen. Then click on Deploy.

Once deployment is successful, then you should see Deploy to next environment(Prod) also enabled.

That’s it, lets see if our Solution is deployed to our Test and Prod Environment.

Prod Environment:

Tips:

Use environment names that indicate their purpose, I have used trial environments for demo purpose but this feature is Generally available, so you might try it out in your actual projects meaning the deployed solution will be managed and not editable as below.

Limitations:

  1. Deleting the host environment deletes all pipelines and run data. Use caution and understand the impact of data and configuration loss as well as maker access to pipelines hosted in the environment.
  2. After General availability all the environment will be automatically enabled as managed environments, so you don’t need to worry much about setting up the environment as Managed.
  3. Licensing is also not a problem if you are a maker who’s creating the pipeline, you need to give the Deployment Pipeline Administrator and Deployment Pipeline User to the maker/user and share the pipeline for them to run it.

Hope you found this post helpful and you should definitely incorporate this feature in your projects to deploy managed solutions from one environment to another. How cool is this one….

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

DAX Studio – Great tool to debug your DAX Queries for Power BI Projects

Hi Folks,

In this digital era, every Power Platform individual want to make more with their data. So obviously there are gonna using Power BI to provide great insights with their data.

Coming to reporting, every one knows to create their visuals in Power BI Desktop and publish them to Power BI Service to view the Power BI Dashboards in Dataverse. This is common and known by everyone. But if you go a bit deeper and want to build some complex Power BI visuals, you were going to definitely use DAX(Data Analysis Expressions). If you were new to DAX, look at this tutorial to gain more information on how to write them.

Next step is when you were writing the DAX expressions, might be in Measures or Calculated functions(including calculated tables, calculated columns) you can’t just write them out at first shot and publish your reports. Definitely it takes time and effort to write them and make the look syntactically formatted so that every one can understand. So you may need to debug your DAX expressions before you actually use them in your reports. It’s when DAX Studio comes as savior which can be integrated with Power BI Desktop in few simple steps.

First step is to download DAX Studio and install it. As soon you are done, you should be able to see in external tools tab.

When you open any Power BI report, you can open them directly from DAX Studio.

You can then open your DAX queries in your DAX Studio and then run/debug your queries, view the performance statistics etc.

DAX Studio is an open source tool which every BI Developer can leverage to improve your productivity in their projects.

Reference:

Video Reference

Web reference

Hope this helps….

Cheers,

PMDY

Power Fx Fomula Data type – your new companion in addition to Calculated fields in Dataverse [Insight]

Hello Folks,

I believe ever Power Platform professional working on Dataverse had one or other time got a chance to work on calculated fields. Actually it provides an easy way to perform any calculations for the supported data types since it has been introduced with CRM Version 2015 update 1.

Here is a very simple example of simple calculation to get your Fx data type up and running in few seconds….follow along….

Navigate to https://make.powerapps.com/

Open your solution, navigate to the columns in any table….for simplicity I am taking example of Accounts table…

Now create new column as below

Key values for the field, make a note that the data type (Fx) is selected

I already have two fields as below already on the form for calculating the Annual revenue per Employee from Annual Revenue of the company…

So now let’s write a simple Power Fx formula to calculate the Annual Revenue per Employee…the expression goes as below…

Annual Revenue is a currency field and Number of Employees field is single line of text. As soon as you save, system automatically identifies the data type as Decimal Number as shown above, click on save and publish the form…

Let’s see the actual use in the form…as soon as you enter the values for Annual Revenue and Number of Employees and save, the value for Calculated Revenue for the Employee field value will be calculated by the Power Fx expression.

Hope this will be useful in future for your implementations…

Points to keep in view:

  1. This formula column is in preview right now at the time of writing this blog post.
  2. And currently, formula columns can’t be used in roll-up fields or with plugins.
  3. You can use the following operators in a formula column:
    +, -, *, /, %, ^, in, exactin, &
  4. Microsoft Documentation says that the Currency data type isn’t currently supported but it works actually.
  5. The Text and Value functions only work with whole numbers, where no decimal separator is involved

Ref: Formula Column

Cheers,

PMDY

Setting up Postman Environment to test the Dataverse API’s – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

Today in this blog post, I would like to share how we can quickly set up Postman Environment to test out the Dataverse API’s right away. It’s very easy and doesn’t need any Client Id, Client Secret registration in Azure AD for Authorization if you follow these steps as the provided Client id works for all Dataverse environments, so let me take you through.

You just need to have a Dataverse environment that you can connect to and Postman desktop App in your machine(Preferably windows)

  1. Lauch the Postman desktop application
  2. Create the environment by click

3. Enter a name for your environment, for example, Blog Environment as below

4. Get the Web API end point URL for your environment with few simple steps as below…by going to Developer resources in make.powerapps.com

Then copy the Web API endpoint URL as below…

Next step is to add following key value pairs in Postman for connecting to Dynamics..please make sure you use the same clientid(51f81489-12ee-4a9e-aaae-a2591f45987d), it is the same to connect to any Dataverse environment.

Variable Initial value

urlhttps://<your org name>.api.crm.dynamics.com
clientid51f81489-12ee-4a9e-aaae-a2591f45987d
version9.2
webapiurl{{url}}/api/data/v{{version}}/
callbackhttps://localhost
authurlhttps://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/authorize?resource={{url}}

Your updated configuration should look something as below in the Postman.

Click on save to save your newly created environment as highlighted below..

Now all you need is to generate access token in order to authenticate with your Dataverse environment to connect using OAuth 2.0

Follow the simple steps below..

Click on newly created environment, click on + symbol besides it as highlighted below

The following pane appears. Select the Authorization tab.

Set the Type to OAuth 2.0 and set Add authorization data to to Request Headers, if you scroll down a bit, you will be able to see Configure New Token option as below, else you wouldn’t.Auth request headers

In the Configure New Token pane, set the following values:

NameValueAction
Grant TypeimplicitChoose implicit from the drop-down
Callback URL{{callback}}Copy the value
Auth URL{{authurl}}Copy the value
Client ID{{clientid}}Copy the value

The settings should appear as below

Tip: If you were using the Postman to connect to multiple dataverse instances, make sure you clear your Cookies inorder delete the cookies in Postman.

Click on Get New Access Token button, within a moment, you should see a Azure Active Directory pop up to Authenticate your login from browser.

Click Get New Access Token.Once you click Get New Access Token, an Azure Active Directory sign-in dialog box appears. Enter your username and password, and then click Sign In. Once authentication completes, the following dialogue appears and just get the token with few more steps as below.

  1. Authentication completes
  2. After the authentication dialogue automatically closes in a few seconds, the Manage Access Tokens pane appears. Click Use Token.Access token page
  3. The newly generated token will automatically appear in the text box below the Available Tokens drop-down.Token autopopulate

Test your connection

The following shows how to test your connection using WhoAmI:

  1. Select GET as the HTTP method and add {{webapiurl}}WhoAmI in the editing space.Calling WhoAmI endpoint
  2. Click Send to send this request.
  3. If your request is successful, you will see the data returning from the WhoAmI endpoint, like below:Response from WhoAmI

Hope you have found this post useful…when you were working with Dataverse API’s.

Cheers,

PMDY

Run PCF Code Components in browser, deploy to Dataverse easily – Quick Recap

Hi Folks,

In this blog post, I would detail about how you can you work with Code Components, it just takes only few minutes of your valuable time. Now-a -days everyone is moving from traditional HTML Webresources to PCF Code components. I used to be a pro-HTML Developer where I always want to always know how my code is running in browser. Usually every developer wants to try out how their code is working in local before proceeding further. So here we will see how you can run your component locally…and once tested we can deploy them to Dataverse.

So without any further due, let’s get into it…

Firstly you can download these code components from this link, now let’s see how we can use these components in our Apps. Follow with me with few simple steps as below..

1.Install Microsoft Power Platform CLI.

2. Navigate to the folder and extract the zip file.

3. Open Visual Studio Code and navigate to that folder location(Many people suggest to use Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt, but believe me this is a lot easier)

The component’s run time can be found by navigating to the respective folder of the component..

4. Open a new Terminal and execute npm install command(I am assuming that you have node installed in your machine for working with this), this will add all the dependencies to the component folder, it should look something like below..

5. As this control is a prebuilt one, no need to execute build command.

6.Create a new folder using the command mkdir <folder name> inside the sample component folder and navigate into the folder using the command cd <folder name>, something like below…here I have named the component folder as IncrementComponent.

7. Now we will proceed with next steps of creating a new solution project inside the same folder using the following command:pac solution init --publisher-name <Name of the publisher> --publisher-prefix <Publisher prefix>

It should look as below

You should see solution folder components being updated as below

8.After the new solution project is created, refer to the location where the sample component is located. You can add the reference using the following command:pac solution add-reference --path <Path to the root of the sample component>

It should look as below

10. Now you have to generate a zip file from your solution project by building the project using the following command:msbuild /t:restore

Oops, you get an error as below…in order to resolve

If you just try to reverse engineer, the above error says that ‘msbuild’ is not recognized and instructs to check the path variable.

Inorder to fix this, I have followed blog and with minor tweaks, able to resolve the issue, i.e. if you have 64 bit Visual Studio 2022 version, you have to use the below path for environment variable instead of the one specified in the above blog.

Path: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin

Then you should be able to overcome the above error…and you should see a screen something same as below

The next step is to run your Code component in local test harness and see how if behaves before actually pushing to dataverse…so use the following command npm start while making sure terminal points to the exact folder location…

Now the code has been run in your browser, you just need to verify by going to the mentioned URL in the local machine.

http://localhost:8181

There it was, you can see your component running in your local browser window….

These code components can be used in Canvas Apps, Model Driven Apps, Power Portals and adds much more flexibility than customizing with HTML Webresources.

Now you can use msbuild /t:restore command to create a zip file, we are good to use the PCF control by importing it to CDS.

Limitations:

  1. Microsoft Dataverse dependent APIs, including WebAPI, are not available for Power Apps canvas applications yet.
  2. Code components should bundle all the code including external library content into the primary code bundle. To see an example of how the Power Apps command line interface can help with bundling your external library content into a component-specific bundle, see Angular flip component example. 
  3. Code components should not use the HTML web storage objects, like window.localStorage and window.sessionStorage, to store data. Data stored locally on the user’s browser or mobile client is not secure and not guaranteed to be available reliably.

You can learn more about PCF Here…hope this helps….

Additional Resources to try out Code Components

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

Track the Power Platform blog feed…Insight

Hi Folks,

Hope you were having a fantastic year….

By the way, in this blog post, I would like to give a bit of detail how to record new posts in any of the tech blogs mainly for your favorite power platform ones coming from Power Platform Tech Guru’s directly in your team’s channel without navigating away. This helps you to upskill or learn a new topic fast. Pshhh..at least for some.

All you need is a teams license and a RSS enabled blog address to get the feed…all WordPress blogs are RSS Enabled by default.

Ok, let’s get started….

Open Microsoft Teams

In the left pane, select Apps icon and search for RSS

Click on RSS in the search and choose Add to a team as below.

Next step is to select the channel..

Then choose Set up a connector as below

Key in the details of the feed…here for sake of simplicity, I am giving this blog feed…so see snap below, same time you can set the frequency and you get updates from your feed.

Next step is to just save the feed details….and once saved you can something like below…

That’s it, you will be notified each time a blog is published directly to your teams channel and all the feed for the blog will be available right in in Team’s channel as below. How great is it….

This is not a power platform related blog post actually but this tip can greatly enhance your learning in your workplace without getting distracted.

Hope this helps…

Cheers,

PMDY

Email templates showing Xml – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

We recently came across a situation where the new and existing email templates keeps showing a xml as below.

This kept us annoying as already the existing ones are created using Rich Email Template editor. At first check, we verified in our Dev and SIT, badly we saw that this is same in both the environments. We double confirmed that no changes were made to the OOB Email template form, so we doubted that there was something wrong with our environment. Luckily we have one more environment where we able to see the email templates working fine. Then we confirmed that there is related to email template form related issue. Also when we tried to open the existing email templates in new designer from https://make.powerapps.com, they opened without any issue.

Fix: Open your model driven app in your custom solution created and launch it by double clicking on it. Just verify it the forms selected for Email Template entity….

The fix is quite obvious and there you are..inorder for email template to show properly, you should select Default UCI Template type form.

Voila, its back as below.

Hope this useful…

Cheers,

PMDY