Getting started with Power Platform Administration

The Microsoft Power Platform is one of the fastest-growing suites of products, and as with every enterprise tool that becomes business critical, we will need administrators to make sure everything is running smoothly. Whether you’re just starting your role as a dedicated Power Platform admin, or your boss just told you that in addition to your SharePoint, Teams, or Exchange admin roles, you now also have to manage the Power Platform, this blog post will help guide you on where to get started as a Power Platform admin.

What does a Power Platform Admin do?

Your first question might be, what do I even do as a Power Platform Administrator? What is my role? Your two main responsibilities as a Power Platform administrator are to make sure that your business-critical apps, workflows, and agents are running as expected for your business users.

The second responsibility is, of course, security. The Power Platform is amazing, but by default, what stops a user from using Power Automate to automatically copy files from the enterprise SharePoint to a personal Dropbox? Or to automatically post all the latest intranet news on a Facebook Group? 

As a Power Platform admin, you need to configure data loss prevention policies and proper security on all your flows, apps, agents, and pages to ensure that only the right people have access to and use the tools properly.  

Other administrator responsibilities include managing licenses, change management, and, of course, governance of the Power Platform environment.

Tools for Power Automate Administration

What tools do we have as a Power Platform admin for all those tasks? As with most other Microsoft admin tasks, we have the Power Platform admin center and PowerShell. But before you use any of them, you need to have the Power Platform Administrator role assigned to you. Another option is, of course, being a Global Administrator, but that is only for your lab environment as you test things out, as the number of admins with this role should be very limited in production.

The Power Platform Admin Center

The Power Platform Admin Center will be the main tool you use as a Power Platform admin. It is a web-based interface that allows you to manage everything related to different Power platform services such as Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Pages. This is also where you can manage environments, data loss prevention policies, and more. You can access it at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com, or if you like a shortcut, just go to  https://aka.ms/PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center).

Microsoft is now working on an updated version of the admin center that you can access by toggling the “New Admin Center” in the top ribbon to the right. To make things easy for you, if the theme is purple, you are in the current generation admin center; if it’s green, you’re in the new one currently in preview.

PowerShell Modules

Now, let’s talk PowerShell! Microsoft offers two PowerShell modules for managing Power Automate and Power Apps: one for makers and one for administrators. Since those modules are based on .Net, you will need to have PowerShell version 5.x to use them. This comes with every Windows installation; however, you might be able to use those modules on an Apple or Linux device.

You can find the maker module on the PowerShell gallery here and the Administrator one here. You should install both as an administrator. To do so, you simply need to open a PowerShell window as an administrator and run the following cmdlets. 

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerApps.Administration.PowerShell 

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerApps.PowerShell -AllowClobber  

You will need to trust the PowerShell Gallery when prompted to download the modules similar to the image below.

To connect to the Power Platform, run the Add-PowerAppsAccount. This will open a window where you can enter your credentials, and then you’ll be in.

 
If you do not see any red text, It means your connection was successful and you can now run PowerShell cmdlets on your tenant!  While you’re here, why not try the following script which will show you all your Power Automate flows in your tenant, and then how many times they ran last month! 

 Get-AdminFlow | Select DisplayName, @{Name = “Runs last month” ; Expression = { @(Get-FlowRun -FlowName $_.FlowName).count } } | Sort-Object ‘Runs last month’ -Descending

Common tasks as a Power Platform Administrator

We could write a book about all the different things you need to do as a Power Platform administrator, but here are a few interesting things to get you started: 

1. Check out your Environments at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments  
At a high level, environments are like containers that separate your data and data loss prevention policies inside your tenant. You can check out all the sites, apps, and flows in an environment by clicking on it and then going to the resources section.

2. Check out your Analytics. You can see your Power Automate analytics at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/analytics/flow  and your Power Apps analytics at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/analytics/powerapps. This is where you will see how popular the Power Platform is in your environment. You can even filter by Errors from the top tabs if you want to see any flows, for example, that are often failing.

3. Check out your Data Loss Prevention Policies at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/dlp . This is what controls what connectors work together, or even what connectors or actions are blocked from your environment. If this page is empty, like the one below, configuring them should be one of your first priorities.

What’s next?

In this blog post, we introduced you to the role of the Power Platform administrator and covered the tools you need to start managing the Power Platform in your tenant. We also looked at a few tasks you might want to get started with. In other blog posts on the website, we dive deeper into how to manage each part of the Microsoft Power Platform, so make sure to check out our blog at https://www.syskit.com/blog/.