overview of recurrence from your flows

[kriho]

Hi all

How to get an easy overview of the start and end times of all your flows. ?

Have two questions:

1. If you have, for example, 100 flows and you have to set up the 101 flow, where you want to avoid that it does not start at the same time as one of the other 100. Is there a smart way to get an overview of when flows start?
2. Is there a way to see when flows start and stop, so that you can fill the empty time slots with other flows. Take advantage of the fact that your robot does not have too many idle times when it does nothing.

greetings

Kristian

[eetuRobo]

1. I don't know any way to get easy overview of the start and end times of your flows other than putting them in your calendar or some excel file. Or having the flow send you notification whenever it starts and stops.

You should keep in mind that Desktop flows can't start at the same time on the same machine. So they are not going to mess with each other. If you have one machine the desktop flows will run one at a time.

So recurrence cloud flows start at the same time and they both have PAD flow in them the latter one will be in que and start after the first one has completed.

2. Again I don't know a very clean way of doing this.

You could have for example an excel file that has cell being 1 or 0 (ON or OFF). The flows could update that value. So everytime automation starts it first updates the value to 1 and at the end change it back to 0.

Then another flow which you want to be running as often as possible would start every 5 minutes and check if the excel cell has value 0 (OFF) and if so it does its work. But if it has value 1 (ON) then it terminates flow and tries again next time it runs.

You should also think if it is actually important for the processes to be running all the time.

It's not very productive to have bot to be running just for the sake of it. There is also a risk that some flow gets stuck and important flows get pushed back.

I haven't used work queues myself but maybe those could help you also.

[Deenuji]

@kriho 

In your scenarios, I don't see any option readily available in power automate platform.

But We can build our own framework where you can create one subflow or custom action to capture the below details and save as per your wish like Excel/SQL table/data erse and etc..:

1. Bot Name
2. Environment Detail
3. Flow Start Date
4. Flow End Date

and same custom action you utilize or the same sub flow you can share/recreate across to 100 flow and capture the similar details and you create dashboard top of that.

Its time consuming process but its one time effort and also increase your bot governance/monitor point of view. Hope this helps!!

Thanks,
Deenuji Loganathan
🤖Automation Evangelist
Deenuji - Follow me on LinkedIn

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[Agnius · Accepted solution]

The only way to do it at the moment would be building a cloud flow that returns the data to you. If you're an environment admin, you can use the Power Automate Management connector to list all flows and then process them individually.

The List flows as admin (V2) action will return all flows in the environment: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/flowmanagement/#list-flows-as-admin-(v2)

And then you can process them individually in a loop, where you target each of them with the Get flow as admin action to get the details of a particular flow: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/flowmanagement/#get-flow-as-admin

The details will return a JSON blob with the flow definition, which will also include the trigger details. You can parse that and push it to a data table or something like that, where you could review it afterwards.