Power Platform Alerts -Finding the failures

There is a new preview feature just released, called Power Platform Alerts. This new features allows admins to setup alerts for various parts of the Power Platform under certain measures or metrics.

To get started, head over the Power Platform Admin Centre, go to Monitor and Alerts.

Here you can create a new rule, look at your rules either enabled or disabled and your triggered alerts.

Clicking on + Alert Rule, a side dialog will pop out and allow you to configure your rule.

Give your alert a name and then select the product, currently there are 2 products with 4 product types available. Power Apps and Power Automate are the products, and the product types are Model-driven apps, Canvas Apps, Cloud Flows and Desktop Flows.

Select the scope, currently only environments are scoped but these leads to the possibility that we could have tenant wide alerts or environment group level alerting, which would be pretty cool. There is a handy selector to choose the environment and it populates the ID for you, else you can find the ID yourself.

Next you select the metric you want to be alerted on, these differ based on your product and product type. You can see a list of the metrics for Power Apps here and Power Automate here.

Then choose the operator and value. Based on the metric you choose, both of these will differ and the details are in the above link. For instance, flow success rate is a percentage whereas duration is average in seconds.

The severity does not affect the frequency of this alert, which is still aggregated to 24 hours, instead it's more the label for triage, meaning you can filter your alerts, but emails and alerts on the portal will only be every 24 hours.

Once triggered, users will get an email that looks like this:

And you can click the "Opened triggered alert" and it opens the alert in the Power Platform Admin Centre:

I like this alert screen because you can filter and sort errors as well as search, then clicking on the name of the flow/app, opens a side pane showing graphs and statistics. It also includes the ability to copy the flow link or flow ID and then these can be used in tooling or to open the flow itself, saving lots of time and navigating!

In the monitor section of the Power Platform Admin Portal, there is a section for products and you can see metrics for the flows and apps in your environments here. The difference between alerts and this section, is the pro-active nature of alerts, configure them for how you want to report e.g. higher sensitivity for critical environments and the ability to scope this to environments so you aren't bombarded with hundreds of alerts across all your environments.

Linking this into Pipelines and deployments, mean you can create alerts in your production environments, do your deployments and get pro-active alerts if anything in your deployments go wrong and even if it's not immediately after a deployment, but even just in general if an update or something causes something to go wrong, it's good to be alerted about it.

I would like to see a few improvements to Alerts, as they are just in preview right now. As there is a limit of 25 alerts currently, I would like this to expand the scope, to tenant, multiple environments, environment types (like Production Environments), or environment groups.

Also, the metrics and the values, it would be useful if there were more metrics like, as only a couple are supported right now and the value updates based on the metric, so I don't have to look up the duration is in seconds or better, let me define that. If flows run more than 1 day, or 31 days, or 3 hours etc.

Overall, great progress and I'm always a big fan of pro-active alerting, especially configurable ones.

Ciao for now

MCJ