Discovering the Power Platform Admin Center

Building solutions with the Power Platform unleashes opportunities for business users to solve their needs, whether creating a supporting app, orchestrating automation, designing a business intelligence report, or even designing an AI-infused solution using Power Virtual Agents.

All of these platform solutions need a robust backend to support their functionality while also providing the supporting tools and configurations required to manage the platform correctly.

The Power Platform admin center is the central location to manage the backend of all platforms. This chapter will let you discover the essential tools and configurations available from the Power Platform admin center through the following recipes:

• Managing Power Platform environments
• Gathering Power Platform analytics
• Handling connectors through data policies

Readers of the first edition might remember another recipe, Synchronizing...

Technical requirements

From a security perspective, managing the Power Platform admin center requires at least the Power Platform admin role. If your organization includes Dynamics 365, this admin access role also gives you access to the admin center.

However, in Microsoft Teams, when a team gets provisioned with Dataverse for Teams, it creates an environment for it. Users in the owner’s group can access the environment’s configuration in the Power Platform admin center.

Managing Power Platform environments

Environments are containers of Power Platform components. They include all your solution components, such as applications, flows, and data. They also serve as a medium to isolate these components, whether for security reasons or to have independent development environments.

There are different types of environments. Each serves a particular functionality:

• Production: This environment is the one your end users will use when executing your solutions.
• Sandbox: This type of environment is a testing ground for your solutions. You can reset it to start from scratch.
• Trial: You can use these environments for rapid feature testing as they get deleted after 30 days. There is also a subscription-based type focused on enterprise delivery. More info here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/admin/trial-environments
• Developer: This type of environment gets created when a user of the organization applies for the Power...

Gathering Power Platform analytics

Analytics is a vital tool to measure the performance of a given process. These measures can vary depending on their target. For example, website analytics offers information about the visitors to a website, the visitors’ location, and the like. This information provides website owners with clear evidence that they might need to improve their infrastructure to handle the number of visitors or add another server near the visitors’ location from a given country.

Similarly, this kind of information is vital for the Power Platform because it allows you to learn about essential indicators such as the devices used to run your applications, how many runs are executed of a given flow, and most importantly, how many errors your users are getting.

In this recipe, you will learn about all the ways we could get this information.

Getting ready

To gather the analytics information, you will need administrative access such as an Environment...

Handling connectors through data policies

The Power Platform has an ever-growing list of connectors available from different vendors. These connectors perform various tasks, such as handling files on cloud services or communicating data through APIs.

Keeping track of these communications would be extremely difficult without using data policies.

These policies control sensitive data using three groups: Business, Non-Business, and Blocked. Placing connectors in these groups effectively builds a fence between them. If you place a connector, such as SharePoint, in the Business group and then add Dropbox to the Non-Business one, then your users won’t be able to create an app or a flow that uses both connectors. For more detailed information on these policies, please refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/wp-data-loss-prevention

This recipe will create a policy to block popular social media connectors and any new connector added to the Power Platform...