What happens when you run out of Flow licenses?

[WillyD44]

What happens when you exceed the number of Flow "Runs" that come with the Office 365 Plans (see here for more info).  The base licnese without purchasing additinoal Flow Runs is 2000 runs. So what happens on the 2001 run?  Does the Flow simply NOT run?  Is there notification to the user who tried to run the Flow?  To the creator of the Flow?   Are all Flow creators notified?  Is there a dashboard somewhere, where an Admin or other can see that the number of Flow Runs has reached their limit so he/she can buy more or notify Flow creators and users that they have to wait till next month to have their Flows working again.

Also, what exactly does Flow Frequency mean in the aforementioned link on licensing? 

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi WillyD44,

Please take this documentation about “Billing and metering questions” for a reference:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/billing-questions

From the doc we know that Flow will send a notification and Flow might start throttling the runs when your usage exceeds the limits. User will not be back-charged for any runs that happen to exceed to quota before any throttling kicks in.

Under Admin Center>Tenant>Quotas, you will be able to check the Flow runs at there.

About Flow frequency, please check this thread for a reference:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Flow-Discussion/Maximum-flow-frequency/td-p/38691

Staff @TravisB said that the maximum flow recurrence period is per flow, so if you have an O365 license and 10 flows, each of the 10 flows will perform their checks every 5 minutes. To put that another way, that would be 10 checks every 5 minutes (1 per flow).

Best regards,
Mabel Mao

[WillyD44]

Thank you for the reply...just getting to this now.  I read the first document about "Billing and metering questions" however, the reference to Flows getting throttled after is vague.  I have no idea what it really means. 

Here is the verbiate taken exactly from the URL you provided:

What happens if my usage exceeds the limits?

Microsoft Flow throttles your flow runs.

So my question is...what exactly does it mean that FLOW runs will be throttled? 

Looking forward to your reply.

Kind regards,

Bill 

[WillyD44]

I posted a response to your response a few days back.  Please see my earlier response asking "what exactly does throttling" mean?  At this point when we run out of licenses, all we know is that "throttling" will happen...but that needs to be explained for us to understand the impact to our users.  

Thank you,

Bill

[TravisB · Accepted solution]

Hi @WillyD44,

To clarify what is meant by throttling, flow run usage exceeding your tenant limits may be suspended at Flow's discretion until the following billing cycle.

Just to point out, flow run usage is cumulative across a tenant so depending on the number of licenses and active flow users in a tenant, a single user can make use of far more runs than is available in a single license.

If your anticipated usage exceeds the total number of flow runs alloted for your tenant, we'd recommend purchasing additional runs to meet your expected usage.

Best,

Travis

[WillyD44]

Thx Travis.  Good to know.  Your answer would be good information to include in Microsoft's documentation, the FLOW licensing page, etc.  To the best of my knowledge is doesn't exist anywhere yet...except this thread.  

I thought this was a strange stance by Microsoft as 100% of my clients who have used workflow in the past would consider this a situation where their FLOWS get suspended till the next billing cycle unacceptable...however with the FLOW reporting that has just become available, this creates a work-around that although not ideal...is acceptable (my $0.02).  

I do have another question that comes to mind..the pricing for FLOW licensing says for example in FLOW P2, $15 per user for X number of runs per month.  Is a user someone who makes a change in a SharePoint library and a FLOW kicks off...or is a user the person who authored/created the FLOW?

Regards,

Bill

[TravisB]

Hi @WillyD44,

Thank you for the feedback! I've forwarded it to our community team to assist in improving our documentation.

In the case you described the user is the person who authored the flow.

This is effectively a philosophical answer for users in the same tenant since generally runs are pooled among all users anyway. But in the case that a user in tenant A authors a flow which gets triggered somehow by a user in tenant B, the runs are counted against the tenant A user.

Hope this answers your question!

Best,

Travis