Power Apps Monitoring

Power Apps Monitor was a tool that was introduced as an experimental feature back in October 2019. This is now in preview and has been revamped with significant updates that were introduced on June 24th 2020.

Before we discuss these new features, I thought it would be beneficial to walk through the process of using the Monitor tool. You can access the tool from a few different places:

• Within the studio when you are editing an app

• The list of apps

• The details page of an app

Once launched, you can play the app from within the monitor tool.

Navigate through or use the app to record events which can then be reviewed to identify and errors or performance issues among other things. When you play the published app, it gives a warning that those in the monitoring session will not only see the events that are logged but they will also see the data associated with those events.

This leads us to one of the most interesting features of this monitoring tool. You can invite other users into your monitoring session. As you add a user, a custom link is created for each user that is valid for 60 minutes. During this time, any one who is in the session can view the event log. This is extremely useful if a user reports an issue and you want to review what steps they are taking and what's happening behind the scenes when the user is encountering the issue.

Here is an example of the list of events that are recorded in a session.

Here is an illustration of this entire process.

Knowing how to initiate and use a session, let's take a look at some of the features that were introduced recently.

1. Result and Result Info: Statuses now have associated Result and Result Info for easier alternative to the status codes
2. Potential delegation issues with Filter, LookUp, First, CountIf, CountRows functions are flagged as warnings
3. Navigate and ScreenLoad events provide insights into screen load times to better understand app performance

Here are some useful links:

1. Original release
2. Latest release

With this information in hand, start using the Monitor tool to get a running log of all the events that happen in a session or instance of running an app!

Have fun! Get addicted!