Can Two Flows "Talk" to each each other?

[ThatOieBoy]

TLDR: I'm trying to get one flow to "communicate" with a second flow that's running in tandem with it. 
Possibly on the same machine, possibly on a different remote machine. 

Effectively I've got a web-crawling flow, but it sometimes crashes and other times runs into captchas that cause it to pause what it's doing. 
I'm trying to create a 2nd flow that will independently monitor if the first bot is running or not and keep track of the date/time that it was running and not running. 

My initial design for this was to have a common excel spreadsheet that both bots were looking at and have the crawler write the word "Pause" to the excel sheet. When the 2nd bot sees the word pause, it logs the time then effectively starts a wait, check again, wait, check again sequence until the word pause goes away. Then it writes the current time, the duration of down time, and the time when "pause" appeared on time log spreadsheet. 

Neat idea if I don't say so myself. 

HOWEVER, all of this would be MUCH simpler if I could just have a shared input/output variable that both bots were monitoring/changing all the time. I wouldn't need to deal with switching back and forth between spreadsheets and such. 
I would prefer not to have to nest the spreadsheets inside each other using the "run desktop flow" action (this is the only way I've found to connect input/output variables from two different desktop flows). 
Anybody have some suggestions on other ways to do this? 

[MichaelAnnis]

First, I feel like you could do this in one flow, using wait for image or something similar to where if you don't see what you are looking for (say, after the captcha), then it errors out.  And you can record date/time before and after where it is getting hung up to see.  The OnError and Wait commands are very functional

There are environment variables, but I think they have to be ran from the same machine, so you still end up with running the 2nd flow inside the first or concurrently.  Most people think flows can't run concurrently, but I know I have done it before.  I think I physically opened a 2nd instance of PAD in order to do so, but it's been a year and a half, so that ability may be deprecated.

Best of luck!

[ThatOieBoy]

I know I can do it with concurrent flows that don't talk to each other by having one always looking to see if the other is doing things, it would just be easier in my mind to have a variable that's passed back and forth between them. 

Something I'm trying to determine is if you could have a 3rd flow running in the cloud that somehow acts like a middle man for passing the variable from one flow on one machine to the other since desktop to cloud seems to be the main thing the input/output variables were intended for, though I haven't worked on the cloud side of power automate and it would take probably at least a few minutes of reading/researching to learn how to do this. 

As for same machine, concurrent flow communication, I think you're right. I can't even get a flow thats nested inside another flow to pass a variable up the chain. It only seems to work moving downstream (though I just started fiddling around with input/output variables yesterday so I could be wrong).

[ThatOieBoy]

@VJR @ryule @Ankesh_49 @Henrik_M 
Do you guys have any ideas on this topic?

[MichaelAnnis]

Well, environment variables will always work between two flows on the same machine.  One flow can "Set" the environment variable, and the other can "Get" it.  

[ryule]

Sorry, my brain hurts 🙂

[ThatOieBoy]

That's okay. Let me know when it feels better. 😆

I can elaborate more it needed. 

[ThatOieBoy]

Neat! I had no idea this feature existed.