Radimaging Ltd - Paul Beck's Technical Working Notes for Microsoft Technology: App Insights for Power Platform - Part 9

Sunday 13 August 2023

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 9 - Power Automate Licencing

Overview: Licencing is extremely complicated, but there are threshold limits that are being reduced at the moment, August 2023.

O365 users get get the lowest priority profile, can only run the standard connectors, and have a "request" limit of 6,000 requests per day.

What is a Request?

Each flow consists of a combination of triggers, actions, and responses when cloud flow is run, the instance walks thru the actions such as Create a SharePoint list item, setting variables,

What counts as a Power Platform Request

"Here are some guidelines to estimate the request usage of a flow.

One or more actions run as part of a flow run. A simple flow with one trigger and one action results in two "actions" each time the flow runs, consuming 2 requests.
Power Automate Flows, by default, run in the context of the Flow Owner. The "actions" are worked out against the Flow Owner.

Every trigger/action in the flow generates Power Platform requests. All kinds of actions like connector actions, HTTP actions, built-in actions (from initializing variables, creating scopes to a simple compose action) generate Power Platform requests. For example, a flow that connects SharePoint, Exchange, Twitter, and Dataverse, all those actions are counted towards Power Platform request limits.
Both succeeded and failed actions count towards these limits. Skipped actions aren't counted towards these limits.
Each action generates one request. If the action is in an apply to each loop, it generates more Power Platform requests as the loop executes.
An action can have multiple expressions but it's counted as one API request.
Retries and additional requests from pagination count as action executions as well."

Here are my thoughts which seem to differ from the MS notes provide above: Not all Actions count as a request, If i look at the Power Automate Analytics it gives me a break down on the API calls to understand the "Request" counting. Basically any action that does an API call when run adds to the request count.

Guide for planning for limitations:

O365 users get 6k request per days
Dynamics and most per user plans get 40k requests per day.
As a rough guide, I count simple workflows as 3 requests average, medium as 7 requests, large can be over 100 so it is better to build the workflow and from the analytics you can get the number of requests per day.
For each flow multiply by the estimated number of calls
Understand who the quest is attributed to (either the user or the owner of the flow, the requests are counted against the flow owner unless the flow use a pay per flow model.)