Is there an easier way to create an Alarm?

[ForrestTrepte]

I would like to receive an alarm on my mobile phone when a certain type of email is received. It was easy to create a condition that triggers a mobile notification when the email arrives. However, my phone just emits a single beep. What if I don't notice?

I would like my phone to continue beeping until I have acknowledged the notification.

My solution to this was to create an Alarm.txt file in OneDrive and three flows:

1) When email meeting specified conditions arrives, update Alarm.txt file. Set the file content to the subject of the email message.

2) Using schedule recurrence every 5 minutes, get file content of Alarm.txt. If file content is not equal to AllGood, send a mobile notification with the file content.

3) Manual button that sets Alarm.txt to AllGood.

The result is that, upon receiving a specified sort of email my phone will beep every 5 minutes and show a notification with the subject of the email. Once I have resolved the issue, I can press the button to turn off the alarm.

Is there a simpler way to do this? I wasn't able to create repeated notifications using a do..until structure. And even repeated notifications worked, I'm not sure there would be a good way to acknowledge and turn the alarm off.

[v-yamao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi ForrestTrepte,

You might also consider to use Delay action to send several Notifications.

About Delay action, please refer to this documentation for a reference:
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/run-tasks-on-a-schedule/

Hope this workaround could be a reference for you.

Best regards,
Mabel Mao

[ForrestTrepte]

The drawback with this solution is that I can't figure out how to cancel the alarm once I have resolved the issue. I was hoping that I could stop the alarm by turning off the Flow that is triggering them. Unfortunately, though, the Flow has already been triggered and will continue to fire its full set of notifications.

When an alarm situation occurs, I want my phone to notify me every five minutes for two hours in order to make sure I am aware of the issue even if I have temporarily set my phone down somewhere. However, if I quickly see the alarm and resolve the situation, I don't want my phone to continue beeping for the next two hours.

My original approach of setting a text file when the alarm situation occurs, checking it every five minutes to fire phone notifications, and a button to clear the text file seems like the best approach for me and is working well. However, this leaves me with three flows and it is too complicated for me to share this solution with other folks on my team who would like to receive the same sort of alarm.

Does anyone know of a good way to stop a flow that has already started running? If so, that would enable me to use Mabel's solution, which is much simpler.

[ForrestTrepte]

Actually, it turns out that you can stop a running flow! In My Flows, click on your flow. Look at Run History, and tap on the running flow. Tap the X button for Cancel and say Yes to confirm. Hooray!