Flow 30 days limit

[Anonymous]

I'm new with Power Automate and learnt about the 30 day timeout of each flow. I designed a two level approval workflow which is being triggered when there's a new item created in the SharePoint. My issue is there's a chance that no item will be created in a month which will cause my flows to time-out. I've raised this issue with MS Support and the solution provided to me is to check each flow if there's an activity done within 30 days. If there's none, I have to do an activity to each flows to prevent any issue. 

 I may not have the luxury of time to check each flow's activity. I'm looking for an action that I could add to each flow that could prevent timeout even there's no item created in the SharePoint. Let me know if you have any suggestions/solutions. Thank you!

[Gristy]

The timeout is of a running flow.

If your flow is running and sending an item for approval when it is created, then both approvals need to approve within 30 days.

It is not the fact that flow will stop working if it is not triggered for 30 days.

[Anonymous]

Hi Gristy,

Thank you for your reply. I was informed by MS Support that a flow is supposed to run once in every 30 days. If there's no action within 28 days the trigger will fail and could possibly cause the error code 500.

[v-alzhan-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

There is no any alternative way except that you try to run the flow every 28 days.

Best regards,

Alice       

Community Support Team _ Alice Zhang
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[Anonymous]

Hi Alice,

So the flows created are not fully automated as human intervention is still necessary.

The flows that I have created are for user requests that will require managers' approval. The approvals are being mapped from another SharePoint list. So creating an item in the SharePoint list if there's no activity done within 28 days is not option. Should I modify each flow from time to time to prevent time out?

[v-alzhan-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Yes, I'm afraid that the only way is to modify the flow manually.

Best regards,

Alice       

Community Support Team _ Alice Zhang
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Hi Alice,

I tried to run a flow which haven't triggered a month ago. I didn't get any errors tho. I was a bit confused now about the time out. Is it for the running flow only?

[v-alzhan-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Yes

Best regards,

Alice       

Community Support Team _ Alice Zhang
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Please find below the answer I got from MS Support: 

• Flow run timeout: For a running flow, the time out duration is 30 days. You can refer to this reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/limits-and-config#run-duration-and-retention
• Flow without any run (not being triggered) in a certain amount of time:

As long as the Flow is active (turned on) and the connections used within the Flow are still valid, the Flow should be working as expected.
A connection being valid means that the access token is not expired. The access token is acquired during logging process (when you enter your credentials to create a connection) or during a Flow run when the third party service provides a mechanism to automatically extend the access token (usually via refresh token).

For example, if you have a SP online connection and it’s not been used in any Flow for 90 days, the next the Flow that contains that connection runs, we probably will receive an authentication error.
From Flow perspective, it does not have anything to do with the expiration period of the services that it’s trying to connect to. For SharePoint it’s 90 days but for Gmail connection, it might be different. Thus, I would suggest to check the token lifetimes of the third party services before deploying any Flow interacting with them.

To sum it up, the validity of a Flow which is not being triggered will depend on the lifetime of the connections it is using. For some services, you can extend the token lifetimes but then there will be a tradeoff between security and accessibility. Otherwise, you just need to make sure the connection is refreshed within its lifetime (by log out and log in, or run the Flow once in a while).

[Anonymous]

Yes it is only for a Running Flow. If a Flow Instance is Running for example and it waiting for approval for 28 days, that Approval action will timeout.

[Anonymous]

I disagree. I agree with Gristy's response in this thread (1-15-2020 04:41 PM) that it is on the Instance that it times out.

[kaurtik]

I am facing crucial situation for 28 days time out for MS flow instance.

because of this my project is delayed to deploy production site.

Any solution to retain MS flow log instance?

[Anonymous]

If you wanted to dig into PowerAutomate a little more, I just posted a way to work around the 30-day Flow timeout for approvals that we are now using on multiple processes.  It creates the approval request, then only triggers when the back-end record in the Dataverse (where approvals are stored and managed from) is updated - meaning that it was responded to:  https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Long-running-approvals-How-long-after-an-approval... 

With the new approvals tab in Teams, this has been working GREAT for us.  Hope it provides some value to you.