Power Platform Environment discovery

[NewNW]

Hi All,

Is there any way to do a full audit and discovery on power platform environments? We cant use COE tool kit as we are using a shared tenancy with a couple of organisations, and they won't allow us to audit environments managed by them.  

Much appreciate it if someone can share the experience. 

Thanks. 

[joe_hannes_col · Accepted solution]

Hello @NewNW,

Could you please elaborate on what exactly you want to audit and discover?

There may be different options that could help you:

• You could convert your environment to a managed environment. This is going to give you a number of insights that you would otherwise get from the Center of Excellence. However, going managed means that you require standalone licenses for the resources in the environment, e.g. apps and flows, as outlined in the Licensing section of the documentation. Managed environments can be turned on for individual environments, so it will not impact the other environments in your tenant.
• If you need to audit changes to data in the Dataverse table, you can use the built-in auditing functionality in Dataverse. Again, this is a per-environment feature, so you could enable it for your environment while the other environments will not be impacted. You can find more information on the audit feature here.
• You can also set up the Center of Excellence to exclude environments when creating the inventory of resources in the tenant. In this case, you would have to define the environments that you want monitored by the CoE. All other environments will be excluded from the inventory. You can find more information on this here.

[NewNW]

@joe_hannes_col Thank you very much for your reply.

Like I said I want to do a full audit/ discovery in the Power platform. Eg How many apps/ flows are in each environment, who create, when, Shared with, what connections used, etc and specially app last launch date. 

Would love to get all information mentioned here .  But only for specific environments.

Like you mentioned if we can target COE Inventory to give inventory on the specific environments we might be able to use COE kit as we can select environments belongs to us and exclude environments belongs to other organisations. But only issue is we need tenancy admin to install this ( Microsoft Power Platform service admin, global tenant admin, or Dynamics 365 service admin) ?

Thanks.

[joe_hannes_col]

Hello @NewNW,

Yes, this is correct, you would require one of these roles to properly install and set up the CoE. App last launch dates are collected through the audit log connector, which connects to the Microsoft 365 audit log. To do this, you need to register an app in Azure AD with admin privileges.

The alternative would be to use managed environments, which also give you an overview about usage, e.g. app last launch dates.

[jukka-niiranen]

Using Managed Environments isn't really going to be very useful currently, since the usage insights feature is limited to the weekly digest email and nothing else on the reporting side, from what I've seen.

To have visibility into the contents of an environment, you'll need to be am environment level admin at least. Now, if you do have an account that's admin in all the environments you want to audit and the tenant level admins have enabled the tenant-level analytics feature, then from Power Platform Admin Center under Analytics you'll be able to see usage and inventory data for all apps and flows in the environments your account has admin access to. Even though the feature name might imply something different, the reports are actually filtered based on the currently logged in user and its access rights.

[NewNW]

Thank you @joe_hannes_col and @jukka-niiranen appreciated your reply.

One more question to clarify, if I install the COE kit in the currently shared tenancy and is it possible for me to migrate the COE kit to another tenancy if we decide to move to a dedicated tenancy for ourselves?

Thanks.

[joe_hannes_col]

Hello @NewNW,

I would say it depends 🙂

If you enhance the functionality of the Center of Excellence by adding new columns, modifying views, etc. then yes, you can move these customizations to your new tenant/environment using solutions.

However, if you want to move the data within the CoE, e.g. app launches etc. to a new tenant, this would not be easy. You could move the data using the Configuration Migration Tool, but the references to apps, flows, etc. will break. For example if you export a solution with an app to your new tenant, CoE will not recognize that the apps are the same ones (because environment and app IDs will change, and they are used to identify resources in the CoE).

I hope that makes sense.

[NewNW]

@joe_hannes_col  yes I can understand, migration data is not worth as moving to a new tenancy. But if we can migrate the environment that we install the COE kit with customisation ( columns and views, etc) I think it is a win.

After migrating to the new tenancy then the COE kit collects new tenancy data 😀

Thanks

[joe_hannes_col]

Exactly, @NewNW 🙂

Good luck with setting up the CoE and your governance.

[NewNW]

@joe_hannes_col  Thank you very much. Will ping you if I face any issues.😉

The Power App per license and Power Automate per license requirement only for the user/ admin is setting up the COE tool kit.  The other user required only required M365 E3/5?

Thanks.