Monitoring the Power Platform: Canvas Driven Apps – Power Apps Analytics
Summary
Microsoft Power Apps Canvas Driven Apps represent a no or low code approach to building and delivering modern applications for makers. The requirements of a deep knowledge of programming languages such as C# have been removed, allowing makers of virtually any background to build apps. These apps can be used with hundreds of prebuilt and custom connectors extending a flexible pixel perfect user interface. Apps can also be generated from data sources automatically allowing you to quickly create and deploy an application to your team or customers.
This purpose of this article is to examine the Power Apps Analytics feature. We will review current functionality and report use cases within the analytics tool. The recently announced unified service health feature will also be referenced here.
Power Apps Analytics
Power Apps Analytics in the Power Platform Admin Center
Who can access this data?
As shown in this article there consist of various admin roles within Office 365 that will scope to specific reports. Environment Admin will scope to environments the admin has access to while other admin roles will expose every environment.
Navigating the Portal
With the appropriate permissions, an admin will land on the Usage report for Power Apps Analytics.
Below is an overview of each of the reports available currently. As described in the article, each of these metrics is updated roughly every 3 hours and data is retained for 28 days.
The Usage report shows admins the device rendering the player which is helpful to determine if the Power App is being run from a mobile device (e.g. iPhone-ReactNativePlayer) or the web client (e.g.Windows-WebPlayer). The player version launched is also key to see user updates to the player.
The Location report will help admins understand adoption regionally for each Power App.
The Toast Errors report is designed to assist with overall app quality by surfacing error trends and types to admins. Errors can be filtered by device platform, player version and regionally. Error totals are shown in a tabular list while a donut chart shows the overall count of errors by HTTP status (e.g. 404, 500, etc).
For reviewing performance bottlenecks and API calls, admins can leverage the Service Performance report for connection health. Admins can gain insights into the least and best performing services, the mean response time and success rate for connectors and the 50th, 75th and 95th percentile markers for response time. Each of these can be filtered down by service or connector, device, player version and regionally.
Below is an example of the percentile markers chart. What this means is on 3/17/2020 50% of the service responses completed within 2.2 seconds. 75% completed within 49 seconds, and 95% within 49.2 seconds. Looking at the trends in this chart we can see the 17th is an outlier compared to the other dates.
Examining the Successful connection requests chart I see only 37.5% completed on 3/17 with only 8 requests.
Choosing a date with a bigger sample size, I see 53 requests from 4/6 with 100% completion.
Looking back at the service response time chart for 4/6 I see the 95th percentile is 5 seconds.
Finally, the Connectors report can help shed light on the relationship between connectors and apps. A very useful metric in this report is Shares, which shows the number of shares of an app to admin. As described in the sample scenario from the official documentation, this could prove useful to understand and take action on potentially shared sensitive data.
Filtering the data returned
The Power Apps Analytics will show environments an admin has access to review data for. During acceptance or end to end testing, admins may want to focus on a specific environment and time range. To do this, click the “Change filters” button for any dashboard.
Export data for Analysis
Currently the ability to export from the Power Platform Admin Center is not available as it is with the Power Apps for Analytics. I would expect this to change and will update this article once more information is available. Until then most charts can be exported via the ellipsis like other Microsoft Power BI reports.
Service Health within the Power Platform Admin Center
Recently announced in the Release Wave 1 for 2020 is a unified service health experience within the Power Platform Admin Center. This will allow admins the ability to focus efforts within the Power Platform Admin Center, not having to navigate to the Office 365 Portal for service health. This reduces Environment Admins from potentially interacting with Office 365 items and to focus on the Power Platform specifically. According to the article the ability to set up alerts for service outages will be coming as part of the September 2020 general availability
Next Steps
As the Power Apps Analytics feature evolves, I expect administrators will be given increased visibility and tooling to assist with the governance of Power Apps and Connectors. Until then, continue exploring the dashboard and export capabilities to assist with unification of Power Apps and Connectors activity. Working with the data in all of the Analytics areas we can begin to better understand where users are most heavily active and stay on top of high impact issues.
If you are interested in learning more about specialized guidance and training for monitoring the power platform, please contact your Technical Account Manager for further details. Your feedback is extremely valuable so please leave a comment below and i’ll be happy to help where I can!
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