Management and monitoring

This article discusses the tools that you can use to manage and monitor what is going on in your environments. It's important for you to understand that each organization has its own operational model and requirements for creating an app development platform.

Tooling services that provide features specific to monitoring, alert, and actions fall into the following categories:

  • Admin portals offer an interactive experience for doing administrative tasks.

Portals are typically considered the primary path for completing administrative activities. For monitoring, this channel is used mostly for ad-hoc interactive discovery. Microsoft is working on providing a single admin interface (https://aka.ms/ppac) for the Power Platform. Currently, the Microsoft Power Platform components include Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps. Also, some admin tasks are completed in the Microsoft 365 admin center (https://admin.microsoft.com/).

PowerShell cmdlets offer a way to automate both management and monitoring tasks using PowerShell. These cmdlets can be used in a sequence to automate multistep administrative actions. From a roadmap perspective, PowerShell cmdlets are available first, before enabling administration capabilities. These are typically released via the web app interface or via the management and admin connectors. Check out https://www.powershellgallery.com/ to get the latest package.

Management and Admin Connectors offer the ability to use the platform's own tools to manage and monitor itself. Part of the released available 275+ connectors and approval process capabilities are five admin-specific connectors you should be familiar with.

  • Power Automate Management connector is designed to help with administrative management and monitoring (Power Automate Management).
  • Microsoft Flow for Admins allows you to complete typical admin actions, such as disabling a flow and deleting a flow (Power Automate for Admins).
  • Power Apps for Admins connector can be used to set permissions on Power Apps or set permissions to a certain connector being used by this app (Power Apps for Admins).
  • PowerApps for App Makers can be used by the makers themselves, though some actions being an overlay to administrational tasks, such as settings permissions to an app as mentioned previously (Power Apps for Makers).
  • Power Platform for Admins can be used to perform tasks against platform components, such as creating an environment or provisioning a Microsoft Dataverse database or creating a DLP policy for a specific environment (Power Platform for Admins).

Check out the Admin-in-a-day content that can be found in the (GitHub repository) that walks you through examples via hands-on labs with step-by-step instructions.

The Center of Excellence Starter Kit offers a template implementation using the Management and Admin connectors, and comes with a Power BI dashboard that can be leveraged to gain tenant-wide insights.

See also

Dataverse analytics
Admin Analytics for Microsoft Power Automate
Admin Analytics for Power Apps