MISSION CRITICAL: Is PowerApps ready?

[ericonline]

Hello,

Resuming the conversation that was originally posted 5 months ago which received great input from the community. Checking the pulse 5 months later. Has the sentiment changed?

• Do you believe PowerApps is sufficiently hardened at this point in its development to handle mission-critical applications for your organization?
• Why or why not?
• What are your specific concerns? (availability, bugs, IDE, security, features, other?)

Feel free to define "mission-critical" in your organizations own terms. Thanks for the input PowerApps community. You. All. Rock!

[Anonymous]

Hi, This is the 2nd outage i've noticed in 2 years of working with powerapps, but i dont work with it daily. I'm sure a few have gone noticed by me and my users.

Is there a list somewhere of known outages?  it would be really beneficial for people starting out to get a feel for how reliable it is.  Anyone got any ideas on how we could track these outages?

[PhilD]

@Anonymous These two from a few months ago affected us for approximately 2 hours on each occasion.

First event

1/29/2019

PowerApps completely inaccessible for the duration of the event.

https://hub.packtpub.com/microsoft-cloud-services-dns-outage-results-in-deleting-several-microsoft-azure-database-records/

https://hub.packtpub.com/outage-in-the-microsoft-365-and-gmail-made-users-unable-to-log-into-their-accounts/

Second event

2/5/2019

PowerApps completely inaccessible for the duration of the event.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Discussion/Powerapps-Down/m-p/232642#M68398

[ericonline]

Hi @matinav,
Have you compared PA downtime with internally-developed app downtime?
I’d be curious if 4-8 hours a year is “extreme” for these types of apps as well.

[martinav]

@ericonline ,

If I understand you correctly, I think you are asking reletively speaking, how much down time I have due to issues with my code writing, vs the downtime of PA as an application?

If that is the question... I have never had down-time from the app code itself.  I have had some small issues with discovering holes here and there that I need to fix things here and there.  My code has never caused down-time that is measureable.  The only measureable downtime is due to PA and the associated suite of services that are propping up my Apps.

Similar software that do some similar features as my apps... I can say the downtime for those apps is virtually zero.  They are rock solid.  These apps are based on local server SQL tables.  We have never had a local server outage.  But, there will be a day!  When that does happen, my on-prem gateway will crash and PA will be down as well.

I will say that the type of outages experienced by these cloud apps is MUCH higher than having these services local.  

[dyee4613]

Is there some sort of notification system Microsoft has?  If we continue to expand our apps via powerapp, we really need some sort of system to let people know when the system is down and they need to use paper.  

[ericonline]

Hi @martinav ,

I was more asking: 

• Does your org have traditional applications (non-PowerApps) in service?
  • If so, how does thier availability compare to PowerApps?

I come from a large org with a multitude of application types. The downtime I've seen from near daily-use of PowerApps for over the past year has been pretty comparable to downtime of non-PowerApps.

Some of the biggest risks are: 

• When a PowerApp is down, you need a mechanism for determining its down and communicating this to Users along with an anticipated restoration datetime.
• When a PowerApp (or related service, O365, Flow, Azure, authentication, etc.) is down, you're dead in the water.
  • This is the blessing/curse of low-code apps. You get a revolutionary platform, BUT, you can't debug the systems when they fail, only wait until services are restored.

I'm very curious how others are mitigating this risk. Anyone care to share?

@dyee4613 , check support.powerapps.com to see when things are up/down.

[martinav]

Mispost..

•  

[martinav]

@ericonline ,

This statement applied to the non-powerapp reliability:

"Similar software that do some similar features as my apps... I can say the downtime for those apps is virtually zero.  They are rock solid.  These apps are based on local server SQL tables.  We have never had a local server outage.  But, there will be a day!  When that does happen, my on-prem gateway will crash and PA will be down as well."

I am writing apps because we are a small company, and cannot afford the mainstream apps that do what mine are doing.  These alternative, conventional software we would use otherwise would be built on local servers, and would have a similar reliability to that of the other local apps we use.  Thus, far more reliable than Powerapps.  Also, they include maintenance packages which would mean we would not have to have a local expert to manage ths software.  At present, I am the only one who has any knowledge of these apps, and it would take some time and money to find somone to take them over in my absence.  

The benefit of the power platform gives us:

• Integration of data across three different databases
• The ability to use any device to perform needed functions
• Customization for our business.  We can make it whatever we want
• Its cheap (not including the cost of downtime)

[martinavi]

Wrong account

[martinav]

m ago

@dyee4613,

There are links for both ms flow and powerapps that give the latest status. It is my experience that it can easily take a couple hours or even a day before the problem is initially posted. Hardly good enough for a notification system. But thats all there is. I wish they at least make an rss feed for it but no. If you are good enough programming, i could see some routine that could strip the pertinent information from this and post it in the app... but that is low on my priority. You could at least but the links in the app somewhere that users can pick to check status if they are having issues... but the value in that is limited due to the delay in initial posting.

I will say that updates after initial post are pretty timely.

Links.

http://powerapps.microsoft.com/support
http://flow.microsoft.com/support