We’ve heard from customers the importance of clearly understanding the health of their enterprise automations through detailed analytics and proactive recommendations. To support this need, there are updates to monitoring and analytics tools in Automation Center and Power Platform Admin Center:

• Monitor cross environments the health of automations in Power Platform Admin Center
• Operate and troubleshoot automations in Automation Center with the hierarchical run history view and copilot generally available
• Increased action log capacity and near-real-time logging for Desktop flows with logs V2
• New advanced desktop flow recommendations

Unveiling Public preview of monitoring Power Automate in Power Platform Admin Center 

Following up on the announcement made at Ignite for Power Apps monitoring in PPAC, we are excited to announce that Power Automate resources are now available in the Monitoring Hub in Public Preview.

The Monitoring Hub is an innovative experience that enables admins to observe and maintain optimal operations by managing changes to production environments, detecting and remediating incidents, and maintaining business continuity.

The Monitoring page brings attention to resources with degraded operational health and highlights which resources have opportunities for improvement.

Thanks to the new Power Automate view in Monitoring Hub, you can now track the success rate of your cloud and desktop flows, the machine wait time in queue of your desktop flows to monitor the scalability of the allocated machines, across environments. There are many more resource types and associated metrics to come in the future.

For automations running in a Managed Environment, contextual recommendations help you enhancing their health and efficiency. The recommendation can be shared in Teams with stakeholders who can then deep dive in Automation center to troubleshoot.

Run history in Automation Center is now generally available

Automation center is a central hub for efficient monitoring and troubleshooting experiences for automation processes across Power Automate at scale. The automation center provides comprehensive visualizations to monitor the health of the automations, quickly detect issues or trends, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently. 

Whether you’re a developer, operator, Center of Excellence team member, or business analyst, the automation center provides a centralized view of the activity of your automations within an environment. It features a user-friendly interface with dashboards that show the health status of flows and work queues, desktop flow activity and for Managed Environment recommendations.

We are excited to announce that the hierarchical flow runs view and copilot are now available in general availability. 

Hierarchical Flow runs view

The runs tab presents a consolidated view of cloud and desktop flow run data displayed in a hierarchical list view. You can easily see at a glance the status of all dependent runs whether they succeeded or failed.

Copilot automation insights

When you are looking for more detailed insights, you can use Copilot to analyze your automation activity. Copilot in Automation Center is able to answer questions about your cloud and desktop flow runs, work queue data and documentation (preview).

Desktop flow logs V2 with near-real-time logging is now generally available

Building on the strong foundations of Desktop flow logs V2, we are pleased to announce the general availability of near real-time logging of desktop flow action logs for logs V2 together with drastically increased action log capacity. This feature provides near-real-time log updates of cloud-initiated desktop flows, which is essential for monitoring long-running flows.

New advanced desktop flow recommendations

Orchestration-based recommendations for desktop flow runs (preview)

You can now receive orchestration-based recommendations when an unattended desktop flow run is queued but can’t start due to a locked or disconnected user session of the same user on the machine. 

The “Desktop flows not running” recommendation shows up in the Automation Center recommendation section. The recommendation provide the details of all the affected desktop flow runs, allowing you to take corrective actions within a 10-minute timeout window.

Repair with Copilot for unattended desktop flow runs (preview)

End of last year we’ve launched the public preview of Repair with Copilot that provides attended and unattended selector repair suggestions through Copilot. If you enabled repair at runtime for unattended runs in the Power Platform admin center, you receive repair requests directly under Recommendations within the Automation Center experience.

Once enabled at both the environment and flow level, you’ll receive recommendations when an unattended cloud flow-initiated desktop flow is at risk of failing due to an error with UI or browser automation actions. This could occur when the intended UI element for interaction cannot be located using one or more preconfigured selectors.

The post Enhanced enterprise automation observability appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Protect Identities and Secrets with credential management

1. Desktop flow connection credentials with Azure key vault and CyberArk secrets: Power Automate now supports storing connection credentials securely in Azure Key Vault (AKV) or CyberArk. This ensures that passwords are encrypted and managed securely, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. This feature includes support for automatic connection updates at runtime (like when a password rotation occurs).
2. Certificate-Based Authentication with MFA (Public preview): To further enhance security, Power Automate now supports certificate-based authentication in desktop flow connections. This passwordless solution adds an extra layer of security, meeting multi-factor authentication (MFA) requirements for attended as well as unattended scenarios. This feature is available from Power Automate for Desktop Build 2410.
3. Credentials for Desktop flow actions (Public preview): For desktop flows, Power Automate allows the use of credentials directly within flow actions. This ensures sensitive information is handled securely, not stored in scripts or logs, and accessible only to authorized users. This feature is available from Power Automate for Desktop Build 2411.

Protect Networks

• VNet support for Hosted machine groups (Public preview): the Power Automate hosted RPA solution provides a streamlined approach for setting up and scaling robotic process automation (RPA) to run RPA workloads running on virtual machines managed by Microsoft and hosted on Azure infrastructure. You can now connect your own Azure virtual network (VNet) to your hosted machine groups (Public preview) enabling:
  • Network isolated, private environments with customized network security measures, such as Network Security Groups and firewalls, to control and monitor traffic.
  • Integration with on-premises networks through VPN or ExpressRoute where access to on-premises resources is necessary for RPA workloads.

Please note that connecting your own Azure VNet with individual hosted machines is already a generally available (GA) capability.

• Network Level Authentication support on Microsoft Entra joined or hybrid devices (Public Preview)
  • Network Level Authentication (NLA) is a security measure that mandates user authentication prior to the establishment of a remote desktop connection. This feature assists organizations in mitigating the risk of unauthorized access by ensuring that only authenticated users can initiate a remote session, thereby protecting against vulnerabilities associated with the authentication process.
  • This feature is now supported when running unattended workload using a MS Entra ID account on a Microsoft Entra joined or hybrid device.

These new security features make Power Automate an even more robust tool for automating intelligent processes while maintaining a high level of security. By protecting identities and secrets, safeguarding networks, and monitoring for threats, organizations can confidently leverage Power Automate to drive efficiency with hypermation.

The post New Security Features for Desktop flows: Enhancing protection of identities, secrets and desktop infrastructure appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.