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Limitations

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You can implement the Center of Excellence (CoE) solution in various ways. Each company has its own preferences and objectives with some opting for stringent rules to mitigate risks, while others prioritize user exploration with minimal constraints. Therefore, the CoE Starter Kit doesn't provide a predefined set of design patterns applicable to all scenarios. If your organization requires a more restrictive approach, it must implement more restrictions alongside utilizing the tools offered by the starter kit.

The following sections describe limitations for some components.

Long running flows

There are some flows, which crawl the tenant in order to do their work. Specifically, the inventory flows in the Core solution and the start archival flows in Governance solution.

To help ensure service levels, availability, and quality, there are entitlement limits to the number of requests users can make each day across Power Apps, Power Automate. For more information, see Requests limits and allocations.

Larger tenants might require a Power Automate Per Flow license for these flows to complete in a timely manner.

Note

The first run of the sync flows has a full inventory and runs a long time, since it updates every flow/app/etc in the tenant. Subsequent runs only update apps/flows/etc that have changed since the last run, thus avoiding exceeding Power Platform request entitlements for most tenants.

Flows that don't get activated

The Admin | Sync Template v4 (Flows) flow fails to collect flows not activated. These inactive flows are called unpublished flows.

For example, if you import a solution with flows turned off, these inactive flows aren't collected for inventory because they aren't returned by the connector.

Coauthoring and connections

If you have multiple identities managing the CoE Starter Kit, you might see this error when trying to use the flows:

The caller with object id '...GUID...' doesn't have permission for connection...

The product doesn't yet support multiple people using connection references.

If you see this error, you should either sign in with the identity that installed the solution to run the flows or update the flows to use your identity. To do the latter, browse to the default solution, filter the connection references, and edit each connection to use your connection instead.

Supported languages

To ensure compatibility with all apps and flows, include the English language pack in your environment as the CoE Starter Kit solutions don't offer localization and only support English. For more information, see Regional and language options for your environment.

Service Principles

Not all connectors yet support Service Principles. For example, the Dataverse connector doesn't yet support them. As a result, you can't install and run the CoE Starter Kit using a Service Principle as an identity.

Security groups and approvals

We advise against using security groups to manage access to your CoE environment, since users without access to this environment might be involved in approvals. If you choose to use a security group to control access to the environment, manually add users to the Approvals Users security role.

Trial licenses

Trial licenses don't have sufficient API call allowances to run the CoE Starter Kit flows. For a full list of license requirements, see Setup Prerequisite.

Multifactor authentication

Multifactor authentication can be used for the account setting up the CoE Starter Kit, if MaxAgeMultiFactor is set to Until-Revoked instead of a fixed time. For more information, see Recommendations for conditional access and multifactor authentication in Microsoft Power Automate (Flow).

PIM (privileged identity management)

These roles and licenses must be available to this user continuously. If admin access is granted only temporarily via PIM, temporary access isn't sufficient to run the CoE Starter Kit.

Monitoring cloud flow runs

Monitoring cloud flow runs is currently not included in the CoE Starter Kit, however you can explore self-serve analytics to get cloud flow run information and extend the CoE Starter Kit with this data.

Monitoring desktop flow runs is included, although limited. For more details on managing desktop flows, check out the Automation Kit solution.

Unpublished model-driven apps

Because of a product limitation, model-driven apps not published aren't included in the inventory, since they're not retrieved from the storage table.

Desktop flow runs

In order to see desktop flow runs in the inventory, one of the following conditions must be true:

For more information, see:

Missing custom connectors

We can only gather custom connectors that exist outside of solutions and connectors accessible to the identity executing the sync flows. Therefore, custom connectors within a solution, not accessible to the executing identity, aren't included in the inventory.

Inventory and telemetry differences between PowerShell, Power Platform admin center, and CoE Starter Kit

If you're using PowerShell for Power Platform Administrators and the Power Platform Admin Center together with the CoE Starter Kit, you might notice a discrepancy in inventory. For example, the number of apps returned by PowerShell looks different than the number of apps returned by the CoE Starter Kit.

There are expected differences, and the rest of this article can help you understand what to expect.

App usage

The CoE Starter Kit displays usage (session and unique users) information as early as when the audit log began. The kit can gather data to show usage trends over time.

The longer you have the CoE starter kit installed, the more usage data is gathered. The usage reports in the Power Platform admin center show usage data for the past 30 days only.

PowerShell

Get-AdminPowerApp and Get-AdminFlow return the latest and most up-to-date inventory of the environment you're querying.

Get-AdminPowerApp returns only canvas apps and SharePoint custom forms, but not model-driven apps.

Get-AdminFlow returns all cloud flows.

Power Platform admin center

Power Apps and Power Automate resources return the latest and most up-to-date inventory of your environment. To show the latest information in the admin center, refresh the page.

Power Apps resources returns canvas apps, published, and unpublished model-driven apps, but not SharePoint custom forms.

Power Automate resources returns all cloud flows.

CoE Starter Kit

The inventory in the CoE Starter Kit runs daily to look for new and modified resources since the last run. However, certain cleanup flows only run every two weeks. One of these flows is CLEANUP - Admin | Sync Template v3 (Check Deleted) which checks if a resource such as a canvas app is in the environment. If the resource isn't in the environment, it gets deleted. This flow compares every row in the CoE tables to every Power Platform resource in your tenant. The flow consumes a high volume of API calls, therefore this and similar flows are scheduled to run only every two weeks. This schedule means that your data might be out of date if resources are deleted in the past two weeks.

The CoE starter Kit expects all inventory flows to always run with elevated Power Platform admin privileges. If admin access expires during a flow run, or if the user doesn’t have admin privileges, any resources that can’t be retrieved are marked as deleted in the CoE tables. Once an app is marked as deleted, it remains deactivated. A single flow run with insufficient privileges can significantly affect the inventory.

The CoE Starter Kit shows canvas apps, published model-driven apps, and SharePoint custom forms but not unpublished model-driven apps (if the "play" button on a model-driven app is disabled).

The CoE Starter Kit shows all cloud flows.

SharePoint custom forms

SharePoint custom forms apps can be either in the default environment or a designated SharePoint form environment—or both. For example, if you have existing SharePoint custom forms in the default environment, before you designate a SharePoint form environment, existing forms remain in the default environment and aren't migrated.

Deleted apps and flows

Determining whether objects are deleted is a time-consuming process. Therefore, you might see a delay of up to one week between when an object is deleted from the tenant and when it's marked as deleted in the inventory.

Once an object is marked as deleted, it remains in that state for two weeks before being removed from inventory. This delay ensures that if the object is restored, its metadata is preserved.

You can retain objects marked as deleted in the inventory indefinitely by utilizing the following environment variable: Also Delete from CoE. If this environment variable is set to No, it maintains a record of deleted objects indefinitely. Depending on the applied data filter, you might still see deleted apps and flows.