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Working with environments in Power Virtual Agents

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With Power Virtual Agents, you can create bots in different environments and easily switch between them.

An environment is a space to store, manage, and share your organization's business data. The bots you create are stored in an environment (apps and flows are also stored in environments). Environments may also have different roles, security requirements and target audiences, and each environment is created in a separate location. See the following topics for more information:

Prerequisites

Leverage environments

There are many strategies for using multiple environments. For example, you can:

  • Create separate environments that correspond to specific teams or departments in your company, each containing the relevant data and bots for each audience.
  • Create separate environments for different global branches of your company.
  • Create separate environments to satisfy data residency requirements.

You can also build all your bots in a single environment if you don't need or want to use different ones.

Note

We recommend using a non-default production environment for bots that you want to deploy to production.

Learn more about types of environments.

Create a new environment for your bots

When you first sign in and create a new bot, a default environment is created for you.

You can, however, create additional environments by using the Power Platform Admin Center.

  1. Go to https://admin.powerplatform.com and sign in using your work account. Use the same tenant that you use for Power Virtual Agents.

  2. Go to the Environments tab and select + New to open the New environment pane.

    Create environment.

    • For Name, specify a unique name for the environment.

    • For Environment select the environment type.

      Note

      A production environment is intended for production scenarios and won't be subject to the same restrictions as a trial environment. If you are trying out Power Virtual Agents for free, you'll need to make sure you set the environment to Trial. The standard limitations for trial environments apply.

    • For Region select the support data region where you want the environment to be created.

    • Set Create a database for this environment? to Yes

    • Select Next.

      Enter the environment details.

      Note

      The environment needs to be created in a supported region, otherwise you won't be able to use it when creating a bot. More information: Supported data locations.

  3. Specify the details of the database, such as the language and currency type, and then select Save.

  4. You'll be returned to the Environments tab. Select Refresh to see the environment. You'll also see a notice explaining that it may take a few minutes to fully create the environment.

  5. After the environment is created, you can return to the Power Virtual Agents portal and use the environment to create a new bot.

Create a bot in an existing environment

To create a bot in an existing environment, select the environment in the bot creation window.

Select environment.

Create a bot in an existing environment where you don't have access

To create a bot in an environment where you don't have access, you'll need to be a system administrator or contact the system administrator. You then need to complete the following:

  1. Create a bot in the environment (this step will install the necessary Power Virtual Agents solutions).

  2. Assign the security role of "bot author" to you in the environment. More information: Create users and assign security roles.

You can then return to the Power Virtual Agents portal and create a bot in the environment.

More information:

Trial environments

When you trial Power Virtual Agents, you can create trial environments that expire after 30 days. When the environment expires, all the bots in the environment will be deleted. The data associated with the bot, including any flows and resources you have been using, will be lost.

If you have created your own environment and selected Trial as the environment type, you'll receive email messages shortly before it expires. In the Power Virtual Agents portal, you'll also see a notification if you have bots created in a trial environment that is going to expire in less than two weeks.

Environment expiration notification.

Note

Note that there is a difference between an expiring environment and an expiring license. If your license is expiring, you will be able to extend it without losing any data. More information: Sign up for a Power Virtual Agents trial.

Converting a trial environment to a production environment

When using a trial environment and you want to retain the bots for longer than 30 days, you must convert the trial environment to a production environment.

Supported operations

Power Virtual Agents supports the following environment lifecycle operations, as described in Power Platform environments overview:

The following operation is unsupported:

Known issues with creating a bot

When you are creating your bot, you might encounter the following issues.

Insufficient permissions for the selected environment

In this case, you see this error: "You do not have permissions to any environments. Please get access from an administrator."

You will need to create a new environment. Use that environment to create your bot.

The environment doesn't show up in the drop-down menu of Power Virtual Agents

Your environment might not show up in the drop-down menu due to one of the following: