Power Platform Licenses and Development best practices

[ArneVlietinck]

Hi all,

We are developing a lot of Power Platform solutions. We have a 3 environment setup (DEV, UAT, PRD). They have a combination of canvas apps and model driven apps, use a lot of Power Automate flows and a lot of dataflows to sync data to Dataverse.

Historically we decided to deploy all solutions to UAT and PRD using a service account. This means this service account is the owner of all UAT and PRD apps and flows. Most flows also run in the context of this user. This way of working is used by the whole team and works perfectly fine for us.

However when we look at the Power Platform requests report for this particular service account for the period of 1 month we see the following:

• Power Apps + Power Automate requests: 23.268.951
• Dataverse requests: 70.076.782

As you see this service account is exceeding the request limits heavily and on a daily basis. The account is entitled 88.000 request/day.

We should take action in order to avoid throttling or other penalties, however we are not sure where to start. We could solve everything by buying add-ons or license everything on a pay-as-you-go basis, however we would prefer to have a more structural way of solving this by changing the way we setup our solutions etc...

What are your recommendations? How do you guys solve this in your organization? Would be happy to hear your experiences.

Thanks!

[joe_hannes_col]

Hello @ArneVlietinck,

I would suggest to keep using the service connection for deploying the solution into the target environments. This way you only need to manage and authorize a single service connection.

What tool are you using to deploy solutions? With the CoE ALM Accelerator (or custom DevOps pipelines), you can define a user on whose behalf a flow will be activated. This way, you can balance the API calls among multiple users. You can find more information and a sample here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/guidance/alm-accelerator/setup-data-deployment-conf...

[LinnZawWin]

@ArneVlietinck 

88,000 entitled requests for your service account means the service account is a paid licensed user account, is it?

In our projects, we use Non-Interactive/Application Users as the owner of the cloud flows which are under a different set of pooled non-licensed tenant-level request limits. That is still low (25,000 requests) for organisations with just Power Apps or Power Automate licences. But In most of my projects, we have one sort of Dynamics 365 licence which allows us to have 500,000+ requests for non-licensed user requests.

[ArneVlietinck]

Hi, thanks for your feedback. Depending on the solution size we are either manually deploying or using Azure DevOps Pipelines. A lot of our flows need to run in the context of the service connection, but where we can we will make the necessary changes. A lot of our dataverse request consumption comes from Dataflows, we have a lot of them and some go through very large datasets.

Even with spreading API calls amont multiple users where possible we still won't be able to get below our limits. We are now looking into creating service users per environment or deploying with an application user. 

[ArneVlietinck]

Hi, thanks for your answer.

We indeed have paid licenses linked to our service user, nevertheless the entitled quantity is far too low for what we need. Using an application user might be an option indeed if we use that Dynamics license.

[developerAJ]

since the number of flow count is more its difficult to manage all using one service account.you might reach limitation if not now in future. Alternatively, you can use multiple service accounts. probably service account country wise or department wise.