Prevent unused Flows from being turned off

[hilary_stoupa]

Is there a way to prevent Flow that are rarely used from being turned off? I have a rarely used but still business critical process where there was a warning email and then the the Flow was disabled:

We noticed that your flow has not run at all in the past 90 days. We disabled it on ...

The email address for this account is not one that I check frequently, so I had not seen the warning. Regardless, this seems like something I should be able to disable.

I did see a suggestion to create an admin Flow that checks Flows to see if they are on, but I consider that to be a bit of a clunky work around.

[gabibalaban]

Hi @hilary_stoupa,

I wonder if is not a solution to create another flow with Office365Outlook Trigger - "When a new email arrives" filtered by subject (and take from a previous email the keywords that you need to uniquely identify this kind of warning emails)  and eventually by sender and add only a simply action Office365Outlook - Send an email to be notified about the warning. 

It is just a thought.

Hope it helps !

[MortenT]

I really have a WF (many of them) that is used as "tool" to clean metadata, that can run on demand by Key users. But It is not something, that needs to run very offen. 

I want to repeat the question: 

"How to reprevent unused Flows to be disabled".

/Morten

[hilary_stoupa]

Another concern - what if the Flow is set to run every 4 months and is a scheduled Flow? Does that get turned off too?

[Anonymous]

Is this any new feature update from Microsoft ? we have been receiving emails about few flow which runs once in year or so due to the business requirements..is there any way to exclude flows from auto disabling?  

[hilary_stoupa]

I also just had a button Flow turned off. This is pretty frustrating. I am not sure why Microsoft feels that they should automatically determine whether or not I am using something, simply because I am not using it as often as they think I should.

[Francis]

I too have a super important annual process supported by Flow. It doesn't make sense at all to disable it automatically after 90 days!

[hilary_stoupa]

I've also found that when I  turn a Flow back on, unless it gets used, it just gets turned off again in a week. So it isn't like turning it back on gets me another 90 days. I can't go mimic the action that would cause it to run - this is a production environment.

[hilary_stoupa]

I posted to Ideas, since no one from MS is replying here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Ideas/Stop-turning-off-infrequently-used-Flows/id...

[VictorFerris]

Came here to add my 2 cents. I have a manual flow that is only used in case of emergency when the senior system administrator (Me) is out of the office. This flow allows my less technical team to quickly spin up a new SQL database in the event of replication failure so my thousands of users (and business) don't come to a screeching halt. The fact that this flow is disabled weekly and the only notification is an email to the only person that won't actually use the flow is very frustrating. This issue is forcing me to find a new solution entirely. 

[hilary_stoupa]

Oh and it looks like it may be dependent on tenant. On a client tenant, the messages say:

We noticed that your flow has not run at all in the past 90 days.

On my company's tenant, we only get 60 days:

We noticed that your flow has not run at all in the past 60 days.

EDITED TO ADD: looks like my client's tenant has caught up with mine, and they are now getting turned off at 60 days too. So, rather than make it better by allowing me to "opt out" of this behavior for some Flows, they are actually making worse.

🙂

[MortenT]

Hi all Power users

This link show the new limit (or anyway new to me)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/limits-and-config#expiration-limits

"To keep the flow active you may need to adjust your trigger or purchase a standalone Power Automate license plan"

So if we don't want these triggers to time-out, we need to buy a standalone Power license plan.

Anyone, knows how to find the price for such a plan?

[hilary_stoupa]

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ has the pricing. I know this wasn't a limit when I first created these Flows - so this is super annoying. But thanks for directing me to the documentation.

[CManske]

Just schedule to run monthly (or daily) and have a conditional check for the month or date needed.

if formatDateTime(utcnow(),'MMMM') = April ...

[NotAnApe]

The scheduled trigger with a condition is the definite workaround, but it really makes no sense to me for Microsoft to enact this.  Really if more people use that workaround it is just going to increase the load for Microsoft.  (example: I used to have 10 automated trigger flows that run once each every 4 to 6 months when the trigger is enacted, but now I have 10 scheduled flows that run weekly or daily and check for the condition to be met)  And of course this helps with automated and scheduled flows, but will not help with an instant cloud flow from a button, for instance.

A choice that could only have been made to try and drive revenue from Power Automate licensing, but this really seems to be NOT the way at least for me.

[Dji]

I have this kind of trigger for monthly and yearly tasks. Monthly is ok but not yearly.

[vasoftball5]

From the discussion - it seems the best option is to schedule a flow to run weekly, to initiate the flow that needs to stay alive. You can pass a parameter into the flow call, which means your critical flow can simply check for that  parameter, and exit when it exists. Rather simple approach and workable. I don't really understand the purpose of automatically disabling a dormant flow. It's not like doing so improves Azure performance (it's DORMANT).  SMH

Additonally - your "tapper" flow can be modified to call as many flows as needed to be kept alive. You will just need to modify the subsequent flows to check for the parameter and exit. But you'd at least have a single point of kicking off the keep-alive flow.

[Dji]

I found a new action possible trough the "basic" power automate, the action is "activate flow". Trough that new action, i've input all my flows that are possible to be deactivated (dormant). I run that one on a monthly basis in order to keep everything alive.

Hope it might help others

[nich3play3r]

I believe this is currently the best option to address a stupid situation. Thanks, @CManske , for posting it.

[samsa17]

I've tried creating a Monthly scheduled flow to list all the flows and turn them on. It's running successfully but it doesn't seem to be turning them on. I'm logged in as the Flow creator user/owner.  My flow is below. 

I deliberately turned off 2 flows to see what would happen. But it doesn't turn them on. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,

Sam