Next month we are planning to release a new feature in Serverless360 to support the management of Power Automate Flows in Serverless360. I have just been trying it out and im pretty excited about this feature and the opportunities it opens up for us.
Why should you care about this?
Power Automate is a pretty awesome technology and it is used in a number of usage scenarios such as:
- Citizen Development scenarios where a business team develops their own automations
- Power App / Dynamics developments where Power Automate is used to automate background processes
- Alternative to Logic Apps for organizations teams who chose to use Power Automate for EAI scenarios
- Various other Automation Scenarios within the organization
In many of these scenarios Power Automate is often integrated with technologies on the Azure platform as part of the wider architecture. Common Azure resource types which are combined with Power Automate include:
- Azure Functions
- API Management
- Service Bus
- Logic Apps
While Power Automate is a great low-code platform to be able to build solutions, many IT departments find it a significant challenge to be able to support Power Automate. Its also common that solutions developed outside of IT end up needing to be supported by IT.
Power Automate doesnt really fit into the typical IT Operations toolkit so many customers find Power Automate ends up not being monitored or forgotten about.
Tackling this challenge is something ive been keen for us to do with Serverless360 for a while and we have been hearing feedback from customers that they have this problem and dont really know what to do about it.
IT Operations Monitoring Flows
We are adding Power Automate Automated Flows as a supported resource type in Serverless360 Business Applications. This will mean that you can create an “app” which contains some resources from Azure and some Power Automate Flows from one or more environments and manage them as a group because they work together to solve a business problem.
We will then provide pretty much the same features in Serverless360 like we do for Logic Apps for management and monitoring. A single pane of glass to manage your resources from both Azure and Power Automate!
Below is a screen shot from my demo showing my function app and Email Forward Flow being able to be managed together.
Business Self-Service with Business Activity Monitoring
We also have support in Serverless360 Business Activity Monitoring to be able to send events from your Power Automate Flows to BAM and this will open up a number of features for management and monitoring at a higher abstraction level which would allow you to let support and business super users self service the management of a business process rather than having to manage technical components.
In the video a little further down I talk about an example of how to do this based on the below architecture
The video should start at the right place for this.
Timescales
| Feature | When is it available |
| Power Automate with Serverless360 Business Activity Monitoring | Available now |
| Power Automate with Serverless360 Business Applications | Coming in next release ETA Sept 2023 |
Im pretty excited about these features and think they should help a lot of customers. If you would like to learn more about them, reach out to the team on the below link and we will show you the features when we release them
