As customers move more workloads from on-premises to the cloud, some need greater control over their data. With Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMK), customers can bring their own encryption keys to secure all their cloud data at rest, to provide them with added control. While all customer data is encrypted using Microsoft-managed encryption keys by default, CMK provides added protection, especially for highly regulated industries like Healthcare and Financial Services, to protect their cloud assets using their own key. As we move to unlock such use cases, we are excited to announce general availability of CMK for Power Automate.

With CMK, customers leverage an encryption key from their own Azure Key Vault, which Microsoft does not have access to. Then, they can configure an enterprise policy with that encryption key and apply it to any new Power Platform environment. Once this policy is applied, all the services that have support for CMK will be protected using customer’s key. This operation is purely an admin-led operation and is invisible to low code developers and other makers who continue to use the service exactly the way they do today.

Once CMK is applied, flow definitions and flow run history are protected using the customer’s encryption keys. Power Automate CMK is currently supported for new environments that do not contain any flows. If the CMK operation is performed on an environment that already contain flows, the flows will continue to be encrypted with the default Microsoft-managed keys. You can read more details about Power Automate support for customer managed encryption keys here.

You can find the step-by step instructions on how to use Azure Key Vault to generate a key, and then apply an enterprise policy using that key to leverage CMK here.

If an admin chooses to “lock” an environment, then all the assets that were encrypted with customer’s encryption keys would be inaccessible to Microsoft services, ensuing total lockdown of your data, even when they are stored in the Microsoft cloud. You can find more about operations like Lock and Unlock environments here.

Please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community. Happy Automating!

The post Announcing General Availability of Customer Managed Keys for new environments in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

To establish a successful automation culture, you typically need to build an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) to maximize your organization’s investments and define guardrails to develop RPA and other hyperautomation scenarios for digital transformation in a controlled manner.  Back in December 2021, we blogged about HEAT (Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques) and automation adoption best practices.

We also released a private preview version of Automation Kit (previously Automation CoE Starter Kit), which has been implemented by many customers across the globe at early stages of the development.

Today, we are happy to introduce the Automation Kit for Power Platform, now available to the public as an open source GitHub project.

What is the Automation Kit?

The Automation Kit for Power Platform is designed to help organizations manage, govern, and scale automation platform adoption based on industry best practices. The toolkit is a collection of components and tools based on HEAT concepts and built using Power Apps and Power Automate, so you can easily extend and customize the kit to your needs.

The Automation Kit for Power Platform helps you accelerate your organization’s automation CoE. It includes a set of Power Apps applications and Power Automate flows that provide ready-made solutions to manage your automation projects, capture near-real-time value tracking, and gain insights to your automation initiatives. The kit was built based on feedback from customers across the globe using Power Automate as their choice of hyperautomation and RPA platform.

Case study: Cineplex accelerates establishing their Automation Center of Excellence with Automation Kit

Cineplex Inc. is a leading media and entertainment company that welcomes millions of guests through its 170+ cinemas and entertainment venues.

Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, started using Power Automate desktop flows back in September 2020 to automate business processes within his team. After realizing the benefits in process efficiencies and time savings, he decided to set up the Automation Center of Excellence so that he could further scale the use of Power Automate across the entire organization. To do so, Bo and his team adopted the Automation Kit to manage and have visibility across the automation development lifecycle. The Automation Kit helped Cineplex:

• Accelerate the development of their Automation Center of Excellence
• Centrally manage the automation lifecycle from ideation to production
• Get insights for both leadership and operations team about return on investment (ROI) in automation

What’s included in the Automation Kit?

Automation Project Management

Use this app to manage the automation initiatives in your organization and define the metrics to calculate ROI.

Projects are managed in the Automation Center

Solution Metering

The kit offers capabilities to link Automation Project definitions with their Power Automate cloud flows, desktop flows and other artifacts in order to automatically capture and calculate the contributions of an automation.

Artifacts are attached to solution metering for automatic metric captures

Automation CoE Dashboard

The dashboard provides a holistic view of your automation projects, ROI, and goals. It includes multiple views and metrics that are automatically calculated and refreshed based on what you have defined in the Automation Projects.

Your organization can identify which automation projects to work on using the complexity score and estimated savings to ensure correct prioritization is being made on the automation investments.

Once the automations are established, the organization can then track the savings and track them against goals.

Dashboard showing the complexity score and list of projects

Where to start

Now that you do have a sneak peek of all the cool features the Automation Kit has to offer, here are resources that can get you started.

• GitHub repository to Automation kit
• Automation kit documentation
• Automation CoE Strategy
• HEAT
• HEAT video series
• Automation Admin & Governance whitepaper

What’s next

We’re continuing to evolve and expand Automation Kit features based on customer feedback to support your ability to grow your organization’s automation maturity to enterprise scale.

We will regularly publish a prioritized list of features from our open-source backlog that we will work on and release in our next monthly update.

As part of our upcoming planned regular office hours that start Tuesday 11^th October 7:00AM – 8:00AM PDT with you can register at https://aka.ms/ak4ppofficehours. We will showcase new and planned features and hold an “ask me anything”-style conversation to get feedback about your use of the Automation Kit and prioritize areas that we should work on to provide the most impact for you.

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Automation Kit (such as Microsoft Dataverse, admin APIs, and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

If you face issues with:

• Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/automation-kit-issues. Microsoft Support will not help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.
• The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.

The post Introducing the Automation Kit for Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

You can change the owner to an individual or an Azure Active Directory service account. If the flow is using a service account, see here for guidance on licensing service accounts.

To change the owner, first select a solution flow and edit the flow details section:

Next, remove the current owner and search for the new owner:

If the flow is a scheduled or Automated flow, once the owner is changed, the flow will run under the license of the new owner and use their Power Platform request limits. If the flow is a manual flow, the flow will run under the license of the user who runs the flow. The Plan section shows whose license plan is used by the flow.

This change is limited to solution flows. For changing the owner of a non-solution flow, the flow must be exported and imported by the new owner. Check out this video to learn how to export and import as new owner.

For more details, see the documentation here.

Happy Automating!

The post Change owner of a solution flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

So today we are happy to announce that now you have two different options to monitor the analytics for RPA UI flows — from PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center) or using CoE Starter Kit.

Power Platform Admin Center

The easiest option for admin/CoE to view analytics is simply to visit PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center). This gives you out of box reports with no installation needed. It is accessible to anyone who has environment admin privilege. To access PPAC reports, you just need to click the Admin Center from the Power Automate portal settings menu.

4 new analytic reports for UI flows are available today, they are Runs, Usage, Created and Errors. More reports will be added in a later time.

After you select the report, you can switch the views between Cloud flows and Desktop flows
You can switch to view analytics for specific environment that you are admin with. You can also change the time period (up to 28 days) to view. Data will be refreshed on a daily base. (Note, tenant level rollup report across multiple environments is not available today, but will be coming later)

After you switch to Desktop flows view, you can apply detail filters to see data for specific types of desktop flows, e.g. Power Automate Desktop, Selenium IDE or Windows recorder (V1) type, as well as to filter by attended or unattended run mode.

The 1st report is Runs which gives you an overview of daily, weekly and monthly desktop flows run statics, with trending lines and run results breakdown (e.g. success/failure/cancel) This report gives insights on how actively desktop flows are used in each environment.

The 2nd report is Usage which shows you the desktop flows that being used most so you can get a good idea about your automation inventory.

The 3rd report is Created which shows you analytics against recent created new desktop flows, so you understand how active your desktop flows makers and who they are. (Note, you must upgrade the Power Automate Desktop app to the GA version, released 12/09/2020 or later, in order to generate correct data for this report)

The 4th report is Errors which shows the top error types that have been caused failures in your desktop flows. (Note, you must upgrade the Power Automate Desktop app to the GA version, released 12/09/2020 or later, in order to generate correct data for this report)

Center of Excellence starter kit

Above is the introduction for analytics through PPAC. The other option to view analytics is to use the powerful CoE Starter Kit (Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence)  The CoE Starter Kit will be useful if you need more and richer governance and monitoring capabilities which cannot be met yet using the built-in PPAC reports. Or in some situations, you wish to build your own customized reports or setup some configurable alerts. You will find CoE Starter Kit to be a handy tool for those needs. It does require addtional setup and configurations but many admins/CoEs found it is really worth the efforts. To learn more about CoE Starter Kit and get started, please check out here.

Hope you enjoy those new analytics features of desktop flows. Please start using them and welcome to provide your feedbacks through Power Platform forum.

The post Introduction to Power Automate RPA desktop flows analytics appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

CoE Starter Kit is a complementary collection of components and tools built on the Power Platform that help you build and customize your adoption strategy for the platform.

The CoE Starter Kit has already supported Power Apps and Power Automate flows, and today, we are pleased to announce support for UI flows in it.

As an admin/ CoE, you can get a holistic view across different business units, makers, and processes across all environments inside your organization. For example, finance group can understand how many of their processes have been automated and operation group can understand who their top makers are. Plus, you will also be able to get insights for all the automations regardless if they are triggered from a Power App, Power Virtual Agent, cloud-based API automation or UI based RPA automation.

Here is a quick overview of the CoE Starter Kit

Introduce the new dashboards for UI flows

CoE Starter Kit’s core is a rich set of templates and dashboards. You can view analytics reports related to environments, apps, flows, chatbots, makers, all in one place.

With the new support for Power Automate flows and UI flows, you can now navigate to Flows and UI flows tabs to view in depth analytics, including historical trends, environments, departments, even with the details on connectors used by flows, the last run date, errors, run statics etc. for a given UI flow.

You can use drill downs, sorting, and filtering features to dive into a specific area to get more insights. You can also monitor runs and errors to identify the problematic areas that need improvements:

There are more advanced features ready for your do customize your governance strategy, including the ability to identify orphaned flows (the ones with no owner) or suspended flows that conflict with your Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies; search for flows/UI flows using a variety of filters through Flow Risk Assessment mechanism, as well as flows/UI flows that should be archived according to the Archive score to prevent resource sprawl.

How to get started

1. Get familiar with the documentation
2. Download the CoE Starter Kit solution and follow the setup instructions
3. Configure the Power BI dashboard and familiarize yourself with resources and makers existing in your environments

How to use advanced features to customize governance strategy

1. Identify orphaned flows and use the set flow permission power app to assign them to new owners. Note, this app is not yet available for UI flows.
2. Define your own audit compliance strategy for flows through compliance center. Note, the feature is not yet available for UI flows but will be coming soon.
3. Embrace your maker community and develop a nurture and adoption strategy by customizing new user welcome email

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit (such as Common Data Service, admin APIs, and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

If you face issues with:

• Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/coe-starter-kit-issues. (Microsoft Support won’t help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.)
• The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.

Acknowledgment

Thanks for the great team effort across Yan Qu (PM Intern), Manuela Pichler (Customer Advisory Team), Jose Kovacevich (Developer) and the rest of the UI flows team.

The post Power Automate UI Flows are available in CoE Starter Kit appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Why is this important?
Whether a customer has adopted a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy or is providing employees with a corporate phone, they are looking for more control over the data that resides on a mobile device. Organizations may want to restrict how data moves on the device and ensure the data is removed, should the employee leave the organization.

What is MAM?
MAM allows organizations to create policies that govern how an application is used within a tenant. This can include enforcing app data encryption, limiting the ability to copy/extract data to only approved applications or enforcing a PIN on a device can be implemented.

Does my device need to be enrolled?
Intune MAM without enrollment does not require a user to enroll their device in Intune MDM. However, the Company Portal application needs to be installed on the device to enforce policies. A user does not need to sign-in to the company portal application for MAM to function. The Company Portal application can be downloaded from the Apple and Android app stores.

What version of the Microsoft Flow mobile app is required?
Version 2.31.0 of the app is required. Our deployments for iOS have reached 100% coverage to all regions. For Android, we are staging our rollout so there may be a delay in this version of the app being available.

How can I setup a MAM policy?
An administrator can create polices from the Azure portal. For the purpose of this blog post, we will create an App protection policy that enforces a flow user to require a pin when using the Microsoft Flow mobile application.

• We now need to select an application that we want to manage. Currently, the Microsoft Flow application can be identified as one of the following. 

   com.microsoft.procsimo  (iOS)

   com.microsoft.flow (Android)

 

Note: A more friendly “Microsoft Flow” display name will appear in this experience later this month.

 

• Ensure the appropriate application is selected based upon the platform that you are trying to target. If you do not find it in the list of apps, search for it by typing in the appropriate value into the Bundle ID field. Click the Add button to add this application as a required app and then click Select to complete this configuration. 

• We now need to define our policy that will impose specific application behaviors by clicking on Configure required settings.
• Within the Configure require settings experience, there are 3 areas that we need to configure: Data relocation, Access requirements and Conditional launch.
• Let’s start with the Data relocation settings. Since the flow app is not used to generate local data, we can use the default policy.

Note: This policy has been used as an example. Please modify to meet your organization’s needs. 

• Next, we are going to focus on Access requirements and can establish a policy like the one below. Once we are done configuring our Access requirements we can click on the Ok button.

Note: When testing you can lower the Recheck the access requirements after (minutes) setting to reduce the amount of time you need to wait for a prompt.

• In addition, we can also provide a Conditional launch configuration. For the purposes of this blog post we will keep the default policy and can click OK to complete this interaction.

• Click OK to close the Settings panel.

• Click Create to finalize the policy.

• Within our policy list we should now see the policy that we just created.

• We now need to assign Azure AD groups for which this policy should apply. We can assign access by clicking on our policy and then by clicking on Assignments.

 

 

To select an Azure AD group(s), click on Select groups to include and then select the appropriate group. For this purpose, I have created an Azure AD group and included members for whom I want these policies applied to.

We can now go ahead and test our MAM policy by logging into the Microsoft Flow mobile app and follow these instructions:

• Ensure you have the latest version of the iOS or Android app (version 2.31.0)

• Close the Microsoft Flow mobile app

• Launch Microsoft Flow mobile app

• You should be prompted with the following message indicating that “Your organization is now protecting its data in this app.”

 

 

The post Introducing Mobile Application Management (MAM) support for Microsoft Flow Mobile Application appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Note: The pre-requisites for accessing these reports has not changed, but is something we are working on. Please review the requirements in our previous post.

Both reports provide insight into how users are using flow within your tenant. From a sharing perspective, you are able to understand who are your champions and then figure out how you can empower them to provide even more automated solutions for your organization! The connectors report will identify Microsoft, third party and custom connectors that are in use within your organization. 

When you navigate to the Power platform admin center, you will find an Analytics menu where you can choose to browse analytics for the Common Data Service, Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. For the Sharing and Connectors report, we will click on Microsoft Flow. 

In addition to the sharing report, we have also released a report that highlights connector usage. In the Connectors report we will provide:

What’s coming?
We aren’t done just yet. We are working on reducing the requirements for accessing these reports. We are also working and providing more details within these reports. What else is missing? Would love to hear from you in the comments below.

The post New Power platform Admin Analytics Reports: Sharing and Connectors appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

For those of you who are familiar with the Microsoft Flow Maker Analytics that we previously shipped, the Admin Analytics for Microsoft Flow will look and feel very familiar. We are providing the same Power BI Embedded experience, but with an environment-wide view point. 

Why did we build Microsoft Flow Admin Analytics?

We built Admin Analytics as a result of customer feedback. Our customers want more visibility into how their organization is using Microsoft Flow. They also want quick access to insights that allow them to govern and provide change management services to their users.

What is required to access Admin Analytics?

During this preview release, tenant administrator privileges are required. In addition, a Flow Plan 2 license is required.

Note: During this preview, you will also need to be part of the Environment Administrator role for the  environment that you wish to view Analytics. This permission can be set within the existing Flow Admin center. See the Roadmap section of this post for additional information.

How long is data retained?

Data is retained for 28 days and never leaves the region that your environment is hosted in. However, we do provide filters that allow you to view 7 and 14 days worth of data.

Can I export this data?

Much like other Power BI dashboards, yes you can export data by clicking on the Export data label within the visualization menu.

What is the scope of data presented?

We provide analytics from a per-environment view point. You can select your environment by clicking on the Change Filters link or the Filter icon in the upper right-hand corner.

What reports are included in Microsoft Flow Admin Analytics?

As part of this initial release, we are including 5 Microsoft Flow reports including:

• Runs provides a Daily, Weekly and Monthly view of the Successful, Failed, Cancelled and Total flow runs within a specified environment.

• Usage provides insights related to the types of flows that are in use. This includes Button, Scheduled and System Event flows, all broken down by the number of runs and the trend over a configured timeline.

• Created provides insight into the different types of flows that have been created. This includes Button, Scheduled and System Event flows, all broken down by the number of runs and a trend over a configured timeline.

• Errors provides insights into flows that may be experiencing issues. The errors will be broken down by error type so that you can look for common problems that may exist. In addition, we will provide the total number of errors that have occurred within your configured timeframe. We will also provide you with a Last occurred timestamp which will provide an indication of how recently the last error occurred.

• Shared provides insight into the flows that have been shared within an environment. We will include the type of flow including Button, Scheduled or System Events. In addition, we will provide the name of the flow that has been shared and the number of shares that have taken place including a timeline of these share events.

What is coming next?

As mentioned earlier in this blog post, this is an initial preview of our Admin Analytics. Our team is already working on our next release which will include more details about who owns these flows that have been used, created, shared or have errors. In addition, we will be providing a Connectors report which will outline which connectors are being used within an environment.

Roadmap

In addition to the enhancements that will follow this initial release, we will also be working on more granular access to these reports so that Environment Admins have access to these reports without requiring tenant administration privileges.

We also want to provide aggregated tenant-level analytics so that you can see summary level information across your entire tenant.

What else would you like to see included in these analytics?

Please provide comments below on any features that you would love to see included in this analytics feature.

The post Introducing Power platform Admin Analytics appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

When customers ask how to best secure and govern their Power platform environments (which includes Microsoft Flow and PowerApps), we provide similar guidance. The following list represents different layers that you can use to protect your digital assets and apply governance to ensure your organization’s interests are met.

• Secure data at rest Microsoft Flow does not provide users with access to any data assets that they don’t already have access to. This means that users should only have access to data that they really require access to. It also means that if a user has access to this data through a web browser, then they likely have access to it through Microsoft Flow. A recommendation the Microsoft Flow team suggests, is using a least privilege approach to data access. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team refers to least privilege access as: “Every program and every user of the system should operate using the least set of privileges necessary to complete the job. Primarily, this principle limits the damage that can result from an accident or error.” Deploying least privilege access is a good practice and a big part of an organization’s overall security hygiene.

• Network Access Control The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) encourages organizations to inspect “inbound and outbound network traffic for specific IP addresses and address ranges, protocols, applications, and content types based on the organization’s information security policies.” While Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based application, organizations have the ability to govern how connections are established when users are connected to the corporate network. For example, if an organization blocks access to a social media site from within their corporate network by blocking the sign-on page through their firewall, then when this same log-in page is launched from the flow portal, the connection can also be blocked from being established.

• Location-based Conditional Access For organizations that want to govern where users can access the Microsoft Flow service from, they can setup Azure Active Directory Conditional Access policies that can restrict what network addresses have access to the service. For additional information, please refer to the following presentation from the Microsoft Business Application Summit.

• Data leakage can be avoided by configuring Data Loss Prevention (DLP) polices that allow an administrator to group connectors into Business data and Non-Business data groups. Connectors within each group can communicate with each other but cannot be used within a flow if the connectors span these two data groups. There are both design-time and runtime checks that will enforce these policies.

• Anomaly Detection is another common strategy used by organizations to understand user behavior. For example, if an organization usually creates 5 new flows every day and there is an exponential spike in flows being created, then it may be worth understanding what is driving that growth. Is it legitimate usage or is there a threat. How can this be detected? Microsoft recently released management connectors for Microsoft Flow, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Power platform. We also published a template that will automate the discovery of these assets.

• NIST classifies Audit Trails as “a record of system activity both by system and application processes and by user activity of systems and applications.  In conjunction with appropriate tools and procedures, audit trails can assist in detecting security violations, performance problems, and flaws in applications.” Microsoft Flow publishes audit trail events to the Office 365 Security and Compliance center related to:
  • Created flow
  • Edited flow
  • Deleted flow
  • Edited permissions
  • Deleted permissions
  • Started a paid trial
  • Renewed a paid trial

As part of these audit events, the user who was involved in the event will be captured and in the case of create flow and edit flow events, the connectors used in these flows will also be captured.

• Alerting is another line of defense that should be used to inform stakeholders when corporate policies have been broken. Much like we want Microsoft Flow users to automate their business processes, we also want to provide administrators with this same level of automation. An example of alerting that can be implemented is subscribing to Office 365 Security and Compliance Audit Logs. This can be achieved through either a webhook subscription or polling approach. However, by attaching Flow to these alerts, we can provide administrators with more than just email alerts. By leveraging the new Management Connectors or PowerShell Cmdlets corrective action can be implemented which allows administrators to remain productive as they protect their environment.

• Education cannot be ignored as a layer of defense. Cybersecurity is more than just technology and processes, it is also highly dependent upon people. Phishing continues to be a popular avenue for hackers to try and exploit. In part due to users clicking on links that they shouldn’t. In many circumstances, users are tricked into clicking on links based upon clever campaigns being designed. End-user education continues to be another layer that organizations implement to prevent breaches. Microsoft Flow users should also be educated on company cyber security policies to ensure this security layer is not exploited.

Additional Resources

In this blog post we discussed many security layers that organizations should implement as they seek to govern and protect their environment. In addition to what we have discussed in this blog post, we also have additional resources that organizations can leverage to protect their environments.

·PowerShell Cmdlets for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow In May, we introduced PowerShell cmdlets that provide both user and admin functions to automate Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and administrative tasks. We continue to update these PowerShell cmdlets based upon customer feedback. Please find the latest release here.

·PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Governance and Deployment Whitepaper was released earlier this month and includes prescriptive guidance for deploying and managing the Power platform. Topics within the whitepaper focus on the following areas:

• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies
• PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Access Management
• Automating Governance
• Deployment Scenarios
• Office 365 Security and Compliance Center
• Importing and Exporting application packages
• Licensing

• Power platform Admin Center (coming soon) At the Business Application Summit in July, we announced a unified experience for managing Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and CDS for Apps assets. One of the features of this new admin experience is Admin Analytics, which will provide administrators with an analytics experience that will provide insight into how these flows and apps are used within their tenant.

The post Power platform Security & Governance: Deploying a Defense in Depth Strategy appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Last week, the Flow team blogged about a new Flow Management connector. This connector provides many useful operations for Flow Administrators and power users. Using this connector we are able to retrieve a list of all connectors within a specific Flow environment and send email notifications to interested stakeholders when a new connector has been deployed. We have created a template to accelerate the amount of time it takes to use this functionality, but will walk through the steps to create this flow below.

We want to check every day to see if a new connector has been deployed to our Flow environment. The best way to do this is to use the Recurrence trigger and then set the Interval to 1 and Frequency to Day.

The next step we want to perform is to retrieve all connectors within our environment. We can accomplish this by using the List Connectors operation from the Flow Management connector. To add this connector to your flow, click on the + button followed by clicking on Add an action label and then search for Flow Management – List Connectors. With the List Connectors action on our flow, we can now configure it to target a specific environment that we are interested in.

Note: within this dropdown, you will only see environments that you have access to.

The List Connectors action is going to return an array that contains all connectors within the environment that we specify. Since we are only interested in new connectors, we want to filter our result set. We can perform this filtering by using the Filter array action. Our From input parameter needs to be set to our value that is being returned from the List Connectors action.

Now we also need to provide filter criteria so that we can exclude connectors that were previously deployed. In order to achieve this filtering, we are going to use an expression that takes advantage of the ticks() function. The ticks function takes in a datetime string and will convert it into the number of ticks since 1 January 1601. As part of the first ticks call, we will pass in the date created value for the connector. As a result, our expression (on left hand side) is: ticks(item()?[‘properties’]?[‘createdTime’]). Next we want to see if this value is greater than the the ticks of a previous day. Therefore, our expression on the right hand side is: ticks(addDays(utcNow(), -1, ‘MM/dd/yyyy’)). Within this expression we are using a couple additional function calls. Assuming that this process runs every day, we want to see if anything has changed since we ran this process yesterday. To accomplish this, we use the addDays function and provide the current timestamp in UTC and –1 as a value that represents yesterday.

In order to track the number of new connectors deployed in our environment, which we will also use when sending email digests, we need to create a couple variables. The first variable we are going to create is called NewConnectorCount. This variable is going to be an Integer and will have an initial value of 0.

The other variable we want to initialize is called Email Body. We will use this variable to store our content for the email digest we send at the end of the process. 

We now have a filtered list of connectors that have been deployed since our last run, which would have been yesterday. In order to provide a rich experience, we will use HTML to wrap around connector details returned from our Filter array action. To do this we will use an Apply to each loop using the Body returned from the Filter array action as our input. 

Within this loop, add a Compose action where we can add HTML markup around the Connector Display Name and Connection Created Time values. Below our Compose shape, we will increment our NewConnectorCount variable which will allow us to provide a running total of the amount of connectors that have been added.

Next, we want to construct emails based upon whether or not new connectors were found. We will use a condition for this purpose and check to see if our NewConnectorCount variable is greater than 0. If this is true, we will add some HTML markup to our Email Body variable to make our email more presentable. We will include the number of new connectors found by including the NewConnectorCount variable and we will aggregate our list of HTML-enriched connector details using the join(outputs(‘Create_HTML_Row’),”) expression. If there are no connectors found, we will update the same Email Body variable, but with a simpler message that indicates 0 Connectors have been added to our environment.

Our final step is to actually send the email using the Office 365 connector. Because we used variables earlier for our connector count and email body, we can create one connection and Send an email action and use those variables as dynamic content for our email.

We can now save our Flow and it will run for the first time. 

If you end up with no new connectors within your results, you can modify the ticks(addDays(utcNow(), -1, ‘MM/dd/yyyy’)) expression in the Filter array action. to include a wider window (i.e. –7). If there were any new connectors deployed within the past 7 days, they should show up in the email digest.

In this blog post we explored the Flow Management connector and discovered how to use the List Connectors operation in order to provide some operational insights into our Flow environment. We are continuing to invest in our Flow Admin capabilities and this is another tool available to apply governance processes and create opportunities for your business by using the latest connectors. If you have ideas for Admin related templates or other feedback, please leave us comments below or post on our Community forum. 

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified when new Connectors are deployed in your Flow Environment appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.