How to provide best support to your flow users?

[Anonymous]

Introduction

Some flows are more important for a business and some less. 

Some can provide critical business logic, that should be running as smooth as possible. 

Some time flows fail and this is ok for many reasons.

How to handle failed flows and start fixing as soon as possible, minimizing the possible business impact? 

Drawbacks of out-of-the-box capabilities

Flow provides great out of the box capabilities with notifying flow owners if flow failed. 

But, I found some drawbacks with relying purely on OTB capabilities for critical and important flows:

 - it does not send notifications instantly

 - emails cannot be monitored by the IT team all time

 - multiplying communication channels for handling IT issues

Solution

It is true, that for the majority of even small businesses, an established ServiceDesk solution is a must.
Like Jira, ZenDesk etc. 

The idea is simple. 

How to forward requests to the ServiceDesk if flow failed and make it instantly? 

After building tens of flows for different business departments, I came to this pattern that I am using in almost all flows.

'The process' scope encapsulates the required business logic.

'If failed' scope configured to run only if 'the process' scope failed. 

It only generates a request in the company ServiceDesk and terminates the flow.

Please, feel free to share your thoughts about how to handle flow failures in the most effective way.

Cheers, 

Pavel