Flow history

[sergeluca]

Flow storage is 30 days. Worklow history in SharePoint is 60 days and everybody complains about this (much much too short for compliance reasons like GPDR). We must be able to audit our Flow years after the worklow ends. Could be a paid option, or a way to export the flows history (Powershell)

[Goose]

Is there any updated on Flow History. We want to implement Flow for approvals, but require history tracking from a compliance and audit perspective

[sergeluca]

there is no update as far as I know; what I do is: I log all approvals actions in a SharePoint list or in an Azure database and I create PowerDashboards from this data source

[PabloDickson]

Wow, 30 days only. Seems like a huge gap in functionality. Have same issue here. Was going to use Flow as part of credit note approval process but only being able to see 30 days of history makes it prety much useless as not able to be audited. 

[sergeluca]

it will be extended to 90 days soon...

[mfridlyand]

I agree with PabloDickson. Without permanent retention of approval history most of the things I want to do with this platform are not possible.

[Stephen]

Hello, the recommendation would be to not use Flow history as a permament audit log. For example, the Approvals history is kept forever and you can use that for Approvals scenarios. For other scenarios, you can log to Cosmos DB or Blob storage. 

[calvares]

@sergeluca When did they say it would be extended to 90 days? I've seen a post where they've mentioned shortening it even more.

[ksteelbaron]

@Stephen, this is more than just an auditing issue; our biggest struggle with the Flow history is that if an approval times out (for a recent example, the approver - who didn't want to use the Flow interface - lost the email), there is no way to go back and resubmit the Flow. Since this approval was triggered by a Forms submission, it's not easy to get all of the pertinent information from 31 days ago to resubmit the form all over again. I should be able to resubmit a Flow where an approval flow timed out, but I can't even view the run history for it.

I understand limiting the history, but there should at least be a few days (ideally at least a week) between an approval timeout and when the history is gone forever (if something times out Fri afternoon, I may not be able to look at it until Monday or Tuesday, hence the "few days")

[Lahcen-MT]

Hello @Stephen , Where can I found this "Approvals history" please ?

Thanks for your response.

[Stephen]

@Lahcen-MT  you can go to the Approvals section in the left nav and then select the History tab at the top. That will show all of the approvals a given user has participated in. In additon, if you want programmatic access all of the data is stored in the Common Data Service - so if you are an admin there you can use CDS to access approvals however you'd like.