Power Apps & Power Automate Licensing Overview 🔴 LIVE (July 31, 2021)

hello everyone this is raza bhurani and uh welcome to another session with me live with raza and uh today i am honored privileged to have someone from from microsoft actually come and join us to talk about a very important topic which is not talked about a lot which is licensing and uh thank you kriya kurukula from microsoft thank you for joining me today on live with reza welcome priya thank you thank you so much um i'm really looking forward to this session uh i'm priya kotler i'm a senior program manager on power automatic cloud flows team my primary focus is licensing api limits throttling the topic of the hour so i'm very excited to be here um and before we start i just want to take a moment and thank you razer because uh the service that you have been providing to community has been very significant um you actually probably don't know this i never told you this but i am one of your audience and when i started in cloud flows like an year ago um i was watching your videos one of those videos was expressions and 101 2013 i watched all of this and i thought it was such an easy way to explain i created the same flow you created in that video and anytime somebody asks me questions about expressions i have that flow i thank you for giving me this opportunity to also be part of this thank you you are you are most i'm actually honored to have you here and just to uh because prayer spoke nice about me i gotta give it back but i'm gonna give it back in the in the process oh you know what i actually messaged her and i was like you know i was struggling on licensing i wanted to do a session on licensing and i was like let's face it licensing is not an easy topic to cover and uh i know priya from microsoft she she talks all about licensing and i was like you know she's the right person but i was doubting you know whether she'll say yes or no maybe she's busy it's a weekend let's face it it's not easy uh everybody has personal time i asked her and trust me within five seconds she said yes i changed the timing and the date i messed it up three times and all three times when i went back to her she was like yes so that's how sweet she she truly is and uh i'm really really happy uh that that that she accepted this and thank you priya for for joining us today so uh let's not let's not waste any time then let's get started with our session on power automate and power apps licensing we're going to try and cover as much as we can in the hour uh it's a very vast topic we're focusing on apps and flows uh you have questions i would recommend you to wait because we will have live q a at the end uh so at the end when i'll open the floor for q a you can start posting your questions and i will start popping them up on the screen and andrea will try our best to answer your questions so without wasting any time i'm gonna swap straight away to our presentation and we're gonna get started with the presentation okay i am now sharing my screen priya can you please confirm if you can see my screen yes i can perfect so microsoft power platform we are talking about licensing today it's very important to understand that the platform itself is uh covers a lot of different aspects uh we have power bi we have power apps power automate and power virtual agents these are the four main pillars of the power platform and our focus today will purely be on apps and flows which is power apps and power automate and at the bottom there you see microsoft database data connectors ai builder they also play a key role because at the end of the day your absent flows you are connecting it to some data source you are building your apps and flows by connecting to your data and you do so through the most important piece here which is data connectors and that's why i thought it's very important for us to at least uh throw some light on what are connectors this is the textbook definition of connectors a connector is a proxy or a wrapper around an api that allows you to talk to your data source reza that's confusing well let's let's make it easy you want to connect to your data source no matter where it lives in the power platform all you have to do is create a connection using the over 450 data connectors that are available today and that you do so by connecting to your data through the connector and it's very important to understand that these connectors are classified they are classified in three categories standard premium and preview and these categorizations are what defines whether you need a premium license or whether a seated license is enough for you to create or work with your apps and flows now as a how do i know about connectors how do i know the connector that i'm leveraging is that a standard connector is that a premium connector how do i know that well for that there's actually a very nice uh link which is called aka dot ms slash connectors i will post all these links in the chat as well this takes you straight away to the connector documentation and docs.microsoft.com you can go to list all connectors which lists out every connector that's available in the power platform and here you can clearly see if those connectors are premium they are standard or they are in preview and you have these symbols here that highlight that fact now uh i and priya were doing some prep for this and priya said raza there's an easier way and what is that well just go to flow.microsoft.com so just sign into flow on the left hand side you have the option here called connectors if you select this it will list out all the connectors that are available and right here for every connector we have this option when it tells you whether it's standard or premium if it is premium it will have this premium tag so i'm going to try and zoom in here if you look at microsoft database it is a premium connector if i look at outlook onedrive sharepoint these are standard connectors because they don't have that premium tag below it and here you can even search for a connector so if i'm looking out for sql for example i can just search for sql and i can clearly see that the connectors that are available for sql are all premium so that's how easy it is for you to distinguish whether a connector is standard or premium when you're actually calling a connector or connecting to a connector in absent flows even there you are highlighted or notified that you're using a premium action if it was so it's very simple to find out if your connector is premium or not and why why are we talking about connect as well because the licensing is actually tied to this in in a big way and now having set the stage for connectors let's now talk about the licensing as it stands today as of the recording of this video for power automate and then we will head over to powerapps so let's begin with power automate licensing and this is going to be covered by priya so priya i'm going to hand over the mic to you i took it on thank you next slide please so as humans we are really built for doing strategic and creative work but often we find ourselves doing manual repetitive tests over and over again um so that's exactly where power automate comes into picture you can automate your flows like basically all the manual tasks so that you can focus on the steady zipper it is a low code platform you don't need to have coding experience and we have thousands of templates available for you to get started quickly and to learn how to write flows over time you can automate at scale you can also automate both your legacy applications and also your cloud applications sometimes i mean this is an example that is close to me because i before working in microsoft i worked in a company where i was helping to build an application for customer care service um and one of the things is that it takes whenever somebody calls the customer care it used to take a lot of time because the rep has to log into multiple systems to gather data by the time that the customer is on call uh that would have been and all of those are legacy systems they didn't have apis they were built long long ago uh if we had desktop flows at that point of time it would have been so helpful because customer read can just start and start static flow that is actually taking the customer data filling in all the details and getting the data from all the systems while the rep is understanding what the problem is with the customer so you can you can go do that with lexi applications you can also use a bunch of cloud connectors we have about 527 and the list keeps growing every single day um and you can connect your legacy and cloud connectors using power automate um you can add ai builder for more automation you can train models um and that that has been extremely helpful one of the biggest features that people use and you can also automate uh more securely with for automation so that's really the pitch for power automate uh let's dive into how can you purchase what are the different licenses so there are two sets of licenses the first one is seated license what does sealed mean um if you already have an office license if you already have a dynamics of powerapps license or windows license by just having that license you get some of the power automate capabilities included in it and so that's when you really have to understand okay i already have this license do i need to buy a separate license or not we would discuss that a little bit more detail uh the first thing i would say is when you have seeded license your context or like if you're creating flows they have to be within the context of the application what that means like that's a big word what does that really mean so i have a power app my power up is talking to uh database and whenever i uh add a new row into a table in database my flow gets triggered so now this is this flow is exactly using something that is used by this app so that's really what is called in context the moment you are out of the context meaning that you are creating a flow that sends you a reminder when your boss emails you that is entirely different from the power app or the dynamics license that you purchase that flow is called out of context and you need a separate license for it as long as you are using flows within the context of this a seated applications you don't need a separate license for power automatic and there is a slight difference between office dynamics and powerapps there so if you have an office license which most of you already do you have a school and work account you already have an office license you can use standard connectors as part of office license this is where razer was explaining what are standard connectors um and if you are a dynamic sorry powerapps customer you can use standard connectors and you can also use premium connectors on top of it as long as you are within the context of the application windows licenses that is a new new approach that this is very specific for desktop flows i have a comparison of slides so i will talk through it a little bit more too um next slide please reason and thank andrea just to clarify desktop flows you mean the robotic process automation flows that's right that's right thank you for that i'm so used to saying those words i sometimes forget people uh the next one is standalone plants this is uh like these are plants that we power automate offers and these are when do you actually buy standalone plans like the example that i stated previously right i need to create a flow that's not within the context of my app i need a con i need a flow that uses premium connector but i only have office license at that point of time you can go buy power automatic licenses uh there are there are four licenses only three active one of them is grandfather the first one is a power automate per user plan this is when a user like if you want to license a particular user the user can create unlimited flows with that license they have full access to all premium connectors they have access to standard as well and they have access to business process flows what are business process flows it is more for um if you want in our like organization level flows where you want to do a repeated a like predefined steps by entire organization that's when you would actually go create a business process flow and if there is a need for that you would you would buy one of the premium licenses similarly you have custom connectors what that means so we talked about the connectors which are available in cloud like the outlook word all of these are cloud connectors they have apis readily available and then there are legacy uh you could use robotic process automation to automate legacy applications but then what if you own an api that doesn't have a connector that was provided by microsoft already that's when you use a custom connector you can create your own connector um over the api and wrap it around it and use that connector in your flows uh and if there is a need for that you would need on the premium licenses similarly on-premise gateways what that means is if you have services that are on-premise and you want to connect your cloud services to that you would need a gateway it's basically a secure channel to talk to your on-premise services so if you need any of these like standard connectors premium connectors business phones close uh custom connectors on-premise gateway that when you will really need to go buy a power automate per user plan then there is power automate per user with attended rpa sorry to jump in here so yeah so if i if i am using business process flows which ties in very closely with model driven apps which requires data worse data versus a premium connector so business process flows obviously become premium that's why you need that license right uh custom connectors they are considered premium again and that's why you need an additional license on premises data gateways this is where you connect to your data sources on premises that is also considered premium so if you need to connect to any of those premium connectors or you've built a custom connector or anything on premises in that case you have to have one of these license types is that is that correct priya yep exactly exactly okay just to clarify i'm trying to learn along the way as well please please jump in ask questions this is this should be more interactive definitely uh the next license is power automate per user with attended rpa so this is basically the next step up right like with power automate per user you get everything that per user gives and one thing above that one thing is robotic automation which is uh you can automate your legacy applications using desktop close uh it also includes some ai capabilities too so you can automate intelligently too so that's the second power automate per user with attended rpa the prices that are displayed there are u.s prices based upon regions the prices are going to be different right now there is a limited deal that is going on um even though it says 40 day 40 dollars there there is a discounted price that is going on right now until september so if you are looking to buy a robotic process automation licenses now is the right time the next one is power automatic flow so this is when you have a flow and you shared with your entire organization and everybody from your organization can actually go invoke it and get value out of it instead of licensing every single one of them with a premium license it's easier to just license the flow itself that's when you would go with a power ultimate personal plan the initial bundle comes with five flows you will pay 500 for five floors but any additional flow that you need will be 100 extra so you can just add on you put your business critical flows here and that's you also have higher api requires by choosing a per floor plan and i'll get to what that mean in later slide the last one is a power automate p1 and p2 plans these are grandfathered plans these are no longer available for sale but if you already have these plans from previous uh we would continue to support you until the end of the tenure of that particular plan so i just listed it there so that you have that for comparison too yeah so this is the comparison across all the different plants this contains both seeded and stand-alone plants uh feel free to take a screenshot uh this would be helpful when you are thinking about which one to buy the the first one is for flow plan and now the second column is api request limits per day what does what that really means is when your flow is running it consumes api calls every action within the flow consumes an api call and there are limits on how many actions you can consume in a 24 hour time limit and that's really what the api limits are now you can ask me there is an entitlement and there is a transition period what does that mean so when the licensing was announced it was announced couple of years ago we want to make sure that we provide you the tools so that you can monitor your usage you can know and you can figure out what licenses you need based upon how your users are using it and until we provide those tools we wanted to give the give higher api requests than what we what you are entitled to to just make sure there is no friction so that is where we are in transition period right now um so you will see higher limits than like 10 times more higher limits than what you are entitled to but this is only during transition period we think that the transition period ends next year early next year so until then you have a limit and after that we will uh we will enforce to the limits that are actually entitled so for a per personal plan the entitlement is 15 000 api requests per day per flow but the transition limit it is like 500 k per flow so that is that's extremely uh yeah extremely higher api limits today it's because we are in this transition grace period uh so then with with power flow plan you can have standard connectors you can get premium connectors on-premise gateway custom connectors all that you do not have rpa attended because rpa would need a separate license if you want an attended plans uh you do not have ai builder credits that comes with it and then there is a and before i move to the next one ai builder credit so anytime you are using ai bundle uh the models actually consume service credits and in one of the plans the rpa plans we actually have ai builder included in it so you can train your models to use ai and then there is dataworks database capacity what that really means is that if you are an admin and if you want to create a brand new environment you would need at least one gp database database database capacity and here for every premium license that you buy we give you 50 mb so if you have like four premium licenses of power automate perform now you have like 50 to 4 200 mp and that is added to your tenant level pool um and that current level pool is shared across all the all the environments within the network so that's where database capacity database capacity comes into picture and then there is dataverse file capacity which is needed when you want to uh store your images pdfs etc this is also pulled at the turret level and every time you buy an extra premium license the limit the it gets added to the tenant level pool so so priya from what i from what i am conceiving from this slide deck is i'm using a premium action premium connector i need an extra license now that license also comes with api limits per day so there are limit even after acquiring a license i need to be mindful of how many api calls my flows are consuming and i may need additional capacity it's great that there's transition coming wherein the transition period will offer more api runs but it's important to understand that there are limits there i can't just write a flow that reads data from sql that has a million records i look through it and i push it into sharepoint i can't just do that with flow purely because i'm going to be limited by the number of api calls inside of the flow even though i have the premium license that is true and one additional point there is so if i have a per user license and i created four flows the api limits apply to all four flows so across those four floors all the runs how many api calls did i consume the moment it gets over the limit occasional overages are okay like i mean if it is like a 500 additional actions we won't throttle you but if there is continuous use of additional actions you will experience throttling throttling basically is your flows will slow down and you will see a banner and once the limit time period renews it will just pick back pick up where it i actually had a flow that went over limits and it said the flow is suspended wait for the next period so i actually had a scenario like that yeah if you that is specifically when your flow is continuously being throttled for 14 days yeah then they would because it is consuming higher actions uh i saw a question in the chat the transition period so what transition period is it is since we announced our licensing uh until now we are not being very strict on the api limits that are added to the entitlements we are giving more api limits and we would continue to do that during the transition period this is really a grace period uh during the grace period we want to give you additional tools on how you can monitor your usage and then react based upon it once you have all the tools and have time to react we will go back and enforce it to the entitlements okay next slide so uh similar to this like we have add-ons you have these space licenses and you can if you want additional capacity you can go buy add-ons so power automate capacity add-on is a perfect example you have these api levels like that flow has 15k uh now if you want more than that your flow is genuinely needing that then you can go buy a capacity add-on which gives you 10 000 requests per day for like 50 a month so that is something that you can this add-on can be used for power automate and power apps as well if you need additional capacity uh the thing that to note there though today because we are still in transition period the add-ons are assignable to an environment but they are not assignable for users or flows uh so that's why like the because you just bought an add-on it will not automatically unthrottle your flow there is because we are still in this transition period what you would need to do is that you still need to buy the add-on to stay compliant and if you have a business critical flow that needs to that needs that actions you can call support so they can give you temporary relief um until this transition period is complete so that's capacity add-ons um and also because out of all our plans today perfluo gives the highest api request so if you have a flow that is using like 300k actions per day uh it is much more easier to go buy a perf flow plan for that and assign it so you get higher api limits the second one is unattended add-on uh this is if you like the attended rpa is really when you you want to just log into the system and run the automation yourself like the example that i said previously with customer care rep somebody calls a customer care rep he would enter the mobile number and then starts the robotic process automation that is when the customer is logged in and actively typing in if there is a situation where you want to run automation on a remote desktop somewhere that you do not want somebody to be there present and logged in that's when you would use unattended fba this is an add-on that that you would buy per bot uh unattended rpa think about that all these add-ons need a base license to go with yeah so after you have a base license then you can go by add-on for additional uh features in this case unattended add-on needs either a per user attended rpa plan or per flow plan to be able to have this add-on added to the base license so that's an attended add-on and then we have ai builder capacity adam so with attended rpa plan you have credits included in your plan but if there is any other plan where users want to do ai ai builder then they can go by this capacity add-on it gives 1 million service credits per month uh so you can you can understand your usage and buy as many capacity at all so these are all stackable so you don't have to buy just one add-on you can buy multiple and uh basically they get all added up how many ever you bought together uh i would also talk a little bit about how do you purchase this so if you are an admin you can go to the office 365 admin center that's where you'll go buy all of your licenses and add-ons that's the place to go by um but then if you buy a power automate per flow license um like actually let me take a step back if you bought a per user license attended rpa or just per user license or any of the seated plans you can directly go to office 365 admin center and go find the user and assign that license to that user but if you bought a per flow plan then you buy it in admin center like o365 admin center and then you would switch over to ppac admin center this is uh this is where you will go assign this add-ons or per flow plan to an environment and power flow has one additional step uh adding it to environment is just not enough you need to switch back to flow portal um and find a flow where you want to assign the profile and then go assign it we are we are updating our documentation so all these steps have screenshots and it is easier for uh for you to do it we understand it's not ideal we want to we want to get to a place where you can do everything together in one portal we are not there yet uh but we would absolutely update our documentation to make it clear for you perfect all right thank you priya no problem back to you yeah all right so uh next part before we get into q and a no the last part power apps licensing uh so priya covered what flow it's for automation what's power apps for it allows you to easily build web and mobile apps with a fully featured low code no code development experience for empowering your business users from a licensing standpoint for power apps once again the question is on the connectors do i need premium connectors do i need custom connectors do i need anything that requires me to have a premium license for example connecting to my data source on premises if yes i need the premium plan and these are the plans that are being offered now very recently there was an announcement made around the plans being changed from october 1st there's a good change coming in terms of the price the pricing has been slashed by half so i wanted to put the plan that's upcoming from october 1st 2021 so effective october 1st this is the pricing and the plans the two plans that are available for powerapps we have the first plan which is the per user plan which is 20 per user per month and with this a user can run unlimited apps that use any of the premium connectors on the other side we have the per app license which is five dollars per user per app per month it's very important to understand the per app plan is again per user it is per user per app per month and for that you need if and for that you will pay a five dollar fee per month and with this a user can run can be assigned access to only one app or one portal powerapps portal wherein there are premium features which are being consumed so these are the two plans that will be made available from october 1st the plans are the same the pricing is changing per user plan will go down to 20 per app plan will go down to five dollars both of this is per user per month also until october 1st 2021 just like in power automatory i mentioned about the promotional offer in power apps as well there is a promotional offer ongoing which has been extended till october 1st only the per user plan which is going to become 20 is now being offered for only twelve dollars per user per month however it requires a minimum purchase of five thousand licenses at the same time the per user per app the per app plan which is five dollars is being offered at three dollars once again you need a minimum purchase of 200 licenses so these are the promotional offers that are only available till october 1st it's important that i call out what's being offered today effective october 1st it's going to be 20 for the per user plan which gives them access to unlimited apps and five dollars for the per app plan which gives a user access to one app or one portal with premium features and where are we today what's the current state as of the recording of this session we are prior to october 1st 2021 correct currently if you look at the pricing that's available today this is what the pricing looks like the per user plan is being offered at 40 dollars and the per app plan is 10. so as you saw before effective october 1st this pricing is going to be slashed into half if you're already if you have already acquired these plans automatically your licensing your your fees or your licensing fees will automatically be slashed by half for based on how many per user and per app plans you have acquired having covered the premium part of of power apps right now so these are the only two plans if you have the seated plan or if you have the office plan let's focus on the office plan what do i get with a standard office license you do get access to run apps and flows so priya covered the flows part earlier when if you can use any standard connectors it's exactly the same with power apps if you have an office 365 plan you get power apps use rights along with it you can run custom apps which are only canvas apps you can run as many apps as you want as long as those apps use standard connectors if you have an app that uses premium connectors you need to think about those two options for premium licensing with the office plan you cannot run model driven apps or portals both of them leverage microsoft dataverse which is a premium connector so you need premium licensing for that standard connectors is a yes you can connect to any standard connector premium connectors custom connectors anything related to on-premises through the data gateway they are all premium so they are not included in the office plan there is also another piece to this which is microsoft dataverse for teams that is included with office 365 licensing in these live sessions i covered that entire section along with its licensing part so if you missed that part i would recommend you to go back and watch those live sessions which are available on my channel for on-demand viewing dataverse connecting to dataverse they are all premium so they are not included in office licensing you can of course use power automate here as long as power automate has standard connectors and with your office plan you do not get any capacity for database you need premium licensing to add capacity priya covered that earlier in power automate if you look at the screenshot here on the right hand side at the bottom depending upon the plan you choose the per app plan or the per user plan you get certain amount of capacity database capacity added to your tenant and once again you need minimum 1gb capacity to create a new environment so that's what the powerapps office plan covers one key thing in this slide is right at the end that's the number of api calls that a user with a office plan can make in a 24 hour period and that number is just 2 000. so if you have the office plan you're using standard connectors you can only call 2000 api requests in a 24 hour period so that covers the licensing part of powerapps and power automate now we are going to switch over to q a so i'm going to get me and priya back on screen so before we get to live q a uh on my to my subscribers on my community uh tab on my youtube channel i had so free i had gone out on my community tab and mentioned that i gave my subscribers the opportunity to ask questions to vote for questions and uh i have a few top rated questions that were voted and rated so i'm going to post those questions out here and uh let's try and take those questions live let's try and answer them live and uh once we finish that we'll go to live q a so everybody who's asking questions please wait we will get to you okay so let's get started priya if you're ready here's the fourth question that's coming on screen so the first question is how does licensing work for external users which are basically guest users and is there there's a follow-up to that as well is there a limited time frame license available i'm assuming maybe i need a guest user to access my app for six months and maybe that guest user goes away and some other user comes in so maybe i can transfer it or something on those lines there are two things that you can do um the first thing is like if you are a guest user into a tenant you can bring your own license meaning you you already have a license in your home tenant you can use the same license to access like premium if it's already a premium connect premium license you can access those features here so that's one thing you can bring your own license there is a known issue with that where the api limits of the original license is not being uh not being respected right now but that's because we are in transition period you won't see the problem because the limits are higher anyway but we would fix it by the time we end the transition period separate thing is if they don't have a license from their home tenant what can i do like i mean uh how do i make sure that these people get access you can assign like trials to this uh to these users today you have two types of trials one is an admin trial this trial is started from within o 365 admin center this trial is for like uh 30 days and the way you can get to this trial is you can go to o365 admin center you can go purchase services and you can search for a plan for example i search for per user plan i go into the details there is a link say that say start a trial the moment you start a trial you will get 25 seats assigned to you and now you are free to assign those seats to any of the external guest users they get the 30 30 day limits and once that limit expires with admin trials admin can go renew the trial one more time so they literally get 60 60 days so two times yeah so that's for admin trials separately we have user trials as well which is which is the user themselves can go to the pricing for ultimate pricing page the the the screenshot we just showed is from that page too search for power automatic pricing you would find it then there is a try now button in those plans that gives that takes them to trial uh that's a user starter trial they can also start trials within the product like for example you are a you have access to premium connectors but you do not have access to rpa and the moment you go into desktop flows tab you would be asked to start a trial so those are in product trials so you can start an admin trial and assign it to a guest user you get the user themselves can go start the user trial from either pricing page or from within product to allow the limited time frame usage perfect so basically uh what i'm hearing is if i'm an external user uh i can bring my own license so if i have a premium license in my tenant i'm already covered for any other tenant uh right if i have the per user plan for example for powerapps i am covered everywhere in every tenant as long as i'm invited as a guest in that tenant that's great and uh i'm just thinking if let's say priya i have the office plan in my organization right so that gives me access to standard connectors and let's say priya you built an app with premium connectors and you share that app with me in that case even though i have a license i do i'm not licensed for the premium aspect of it so in that case two things either i buy it in my tenant or you grant me that license in your tenant okay the guest user has to be licensed there's no magic license that pops up and they get uh adjusted to it and let's not forget trials at the end of the day are trials uh i'm giving an mvp or a non-microsoft viewpoint here let's face it trials are 30 days as priya said you know it can be extended twice i wouldn't count on that because it may be extended two times today maybe three in future maybe back to one so don't count on trials trials are meant to try things so don't use that for for production scenarios but what priya mentioned actually is something that i use an app in a day when i when i build a tenant for users to come and start trying things out i always use the trial license because i know that i'm okay for a 30-day period to test out the features so oh thank you for answering that i would add one other thing while admin trials are only 30 days the user trials are for 90 days so you get a little longer too test it okay going on ahead so here's the next question uh which is something that which is something that we actually this was probably the number one voted question is what are these api limits how are they counted i like that question how are they counted and is it per user or does it depend upon license type so that's the question around api limits and i think for this priya you have a slide so let me let me swap over back to the slides with me so we can try and cover uh this in a little bit more detail and i can also go through a flow that i built and priya can tell us how the counting works there absolutely so if you have a license uh you have an api limits that are associated with that license that api limits or across the runs of all of your flows that ran in like 24 hour time frame um the way to think about how i can count my request uh today every trigger every action consumes at least one api request it can be a simple compose action initialize variable http reaction built in action any kind of action any kind of trigger consumes at least one um even if you like if the action succeeded or failed it will still consume it will still consume limits and skip actions do not do not count because the action never executed it won't count towards api limits and then if you have some situations you have multiple api requests consumed by one action for example if that action is part of a loop and that loop runs like five times now it it consumes five api requests just that action because the fact that it's in a loop now and if you have multiple expressions within the same api request uh sorry within the same action it would still only count one api request and any retries pagination all of those things will add to the api requests as well yes like somebody said on the chat please take a screenshot we'll also have this in documentation so you know how to count it one thing to add here is if you bought a per user license that should be across all your flows right uh but today in transition period even though you have a per user license the limits at transition period limits are at the uh so one thing one thing that i'm observing your priya in this uh at least a key takeaway for me here is the second last slide an action can have multiple expressions but it is still counted as one api request uh many people uh many people try and avoid expressions because yeah it's complex like expressions is not an easy language to learn it's another it's another syntax you got to learn it but here's one more reason why expressions are so important is you can actually club 10 different actions together like do a sub string get the second attribute split it by x instead of writing 10 actions i can do everything in one action using using expression so very powerful very important to learn expressions why am i talking about this because i'm planning a video series on expressions okay uh having said this having said this it's easy to look at a powerpoint slide and say okay this is how it works but let's look at it live and at home right so right before this call i built a very simple flow so let's let's assume this flow runs once a day let's just assume okay i'm going to try and count the api actions live and priya is going to tell me if that is true or not my flow is being triggered this is one action gone i am setting a variable two i'm running a loop the loop itself is counted as one so that's three let's say this loop runs five times so that's five multiplied by the number of actions inside the loop i have one action so this would be count as five actions if i had three actions here and they all were to execute in a loop that runs five times that's five into three that's fifteen so that's how the match works so whether you are querying a data source like i'm doing in this case to query an excel file in one drive or whether i'm just creating a variable within the context of the flow every action that you add any action is considered as an api call things that will run in a loop in a loop also count towards an api call so that's very very important to understand and when priya correct me if if there's anything that i missed on this part no no that's that that's absolutely right and i think one as you talk through i also thought about one easy way so if it is getting harder to remember and then count all of these things one thing that you can do is you can just test the flow or run the flow once and go to analytics right there uh so if you already have this floor running you would see in the last 30 days how many api requests did it consume so that report shows up here so yeah let's see this basically is that the actions that's the that's showing me how many actions the flow has executed in a day and it could depend on how many times the flow ran as well right correct correct yeah if the floor like 50 times obviously multiply it by 50 so so this makes it easier like without you having to count just look at the analytics by flow and see how many ap requests this low is consuming so priya some questions from me on the fly if i was to test my flow does that count towards api calls if i'm just testing i'm just building yes it is it does it is i i i hoped it did not but okay okay uh interesting and very important thing guys uh very important remember i'm looking at a flow run my account may be running 10 other flows don't forget the api request is for my account across all the flows it's not just one flow and someone asked a very good question and i think that comes later as well is that is there a report that i can see that tells me how many api actions have i consumed across all my flows in a 24 hour period period so there are there are two uh parts in it one as a maker uh how can i see how many actions have i consumed as an admin how can i see how many actions this user has consumed across outflows right now we have admin reports that are in private preview going on and if you are interested to join the private preview ping me on linkedin um and give me your tenant id in private chat so i can add you to private preview what that is is admin can go and see they can download an excel file and it says these are all the users these are the object ids of the user and this is their entitlement based upon their license and this is how many actions they have consumed in that day so it's a number uh what that tells you is that okay this user has an entitlement of 15k they are using 25k per day across all their flows so now you know either this user needs to buy a higher license that you need to get a capacity add-on or you can go talk to the maker to go optimize the flows there are multiple ways of optimizing one thing that razer just said right like instead of using loops and trying to get data use expressions that will reduce the amount of api calls this flow is consuming and just to give you a real world story i came across a flow that had like five loops running i literally transformed it in expressions and pre-actually tested it using analytics it came down from a thousand api calls per day just for that flow to 210 so you can see what a big difference it can make if you truly know expressions and you know how to play around with things yeah always uh moving ahead from apis i think we've covered api requests and depth uh here is another great question can we use solutions in a with a microsoft 365 seeded license let's let's assume an office license given that we use only standard connectors with apps and flows can i use solutions is the question do i need a license for using solutions uh you do not need a premium license your office license covers for creating solution flows you can create the child flows uh within default environment uh but if you need to go into a different different environment that is not default that environment should have data words attached to it and easy way for you to is if the environment doesn't already have a database you can go reach out to your admin to attach a database database remember when we talk about licensing for every premium licensing somebody buys in the tenant there is an added capacity at the tenant level now that capacity is used to create a new database and attach to the environment so office seated license please feel free to use solutions solutions is really that path forward you have better version control um so that's really where we want everybody to go develop their flows using solution flows today so so here's the big news right you want solutions it's free you don't need a premium license all you need is an environment with database with a database and the default environment already comes with a database if not the moment uh your admin can always spin off one at least in the default environment so you can use solutions there and solutions are very powerful uh there's a lot a lot of good documentation on it so do read about it and uh yeah so no premium license needed for using for creating solutions okay uh next question is a scenario the scenario is a user has a power automate per user license basically a premium license the user then goes ahead and creates a flow that runs automatically when a new item is created in a sharepoint list and that flow uses premium actions maybe uh you know calls uh servicenow or salesforce how does the licensing work for that flow when another user who does not have a premium license adds a record in a sharepoint list so that's the question here yeah make sense yes go ahead sorry sorry go ahead uh so this is this is a common question um the way like this is primarily to identify who needs a license right like um and there are two rules for it one if you are using an automated or a scheduled flow so automated flows are the ones that uh monitor for an action like in this case sharepoint right like a power automatic monitor sharepoint to see if a new item was created in a list and automatically triggers it uh then there are scheduled flows where you can go say send me a project report on sunday morning or send me a reminder for my timesheets on friday morning that is something that you can do so in both automated and scheduled flows they always run in the context of the owner so only the owner needs a premium license if this is being if the if the flow is already using premium connectors there are instant flows and these are manual flows where i'm just done with my laundry i want my my family to go fold the laundry i can go click a button that reminds them to do so so that instant flow you can um and powerapps flows those two kinds of flows every user who is going to use the flow will need a license because in these cases the users uh the flow will be shared to users as run only users and they can go invoke the flow themselves so anytime the user is invoking a flow uh and those situations whoever has the access to invoke the flow needs a license and if if it is only being invoked by automated or scheduled only the owner needs the license in the example this specific example if the trigger uh if the trigger is monitoring the sharepoint list and gets automatically triggered only the owner needs a premium license perfect so back to us great question uh so it all depends on the trigger of the flow so look at the different factors who's triggering the flow where is the flow being triggered from is it a flow is being called from power apps yes no uh who's running this there are so many factors to consider so it's very important to know these things uh one thing to add there is well if you go to the floor details of if of a flow uh please laser can you show the flow details it will tell you what kind of flow it is so you go to a flow and click on it in the detail section there is type uh that type says whether it is instant or automated right so you know like the moment you say an instant flow you know every user who has access to this flow will need a will need license if it is a different flow where it just says automated right here and the owner is just razer and razer only needs the permission there even if it is shared with a multiple like even if it is shared with multiple other folks only there is a need for premium license here perfect great points all right all right here comes another scenario very common one which kind of interrelates with what we just discussed i have a power app and very common right i have a power app and from the power app i call a flow from the power app i trigger the flow that flow uses premium actions the power apps does not does every user who is accessing the power app in that case need a premium license yep that is the recommendation so every user who has access to get value out of a premium connector will need a premium license in this case every user does perfect all right uh two or three more questions and then we'll get to live q a uh here's another good question how can we create more power platform environment so i spun up my tenant i get the default environment i'm trying to create a new environment and it says you don't have capacity so do i need a premium license to create an environment or how do i get that capacity so uh if you like you can either buy a database add-on like there is a capacity add-on for database you can just buy that uh to add a new environment or you can buy any of the premium licenses like powerapps power automate power virtual agent um all of them when you the the moment a person buys a premium license the tenant gets a default of 10 gb additional capacity now one license is good enough to start creating another environment and every other license you buy and adds up to the tenant level pool so usually one of bigger customers actually have a lot of capacity so they don't run into these problems of like i don't have enough space to create an environment so priya is this true if i just buy one premium license and my tenant my tenant automatically starts with 10 gb then correct yeah okay that's a that's a big takeaway from me right here is just have one like you straight away can build up to then what 10 environments more okay wow okay did not know that thank you priya uh going to the next one again a very good question uh something that that when i build videos on flows i think uh i'm really i really love that approval feature and i know everybody tries to build approvals in using power automate so here's a great question does a flow approver the person who is approving it do they need a premium license and is approvals itself a premium feature approval connected by itself is not a premium feature and uh we don't consider the person who is approving as invoking the flow it's like somewhere in the flow the flow is waiting for that particular person to respond but that person is not invoking the flow itself so if you have a premium flow and you have an approval in it the approver does not need a premium license just the owner and it depends upon yeah if it is an automated again just the owner if it's an instant flow other users do and and here's one key takeaway here um somebody had asked me this question as well once uh raza i have another environment that does not have a database so they created a second environment without the database and they tried to use approvals and the approval action failed stating that you need a database well approvals are actually stored in microsoft database whether you like it or not that action is considered considered standard right even though you're interacting with dataverse it's considered standard however you need a database for that in the default environment the moment the first approval action is created in a tenant automatically the database gets created for you that database is kind of a free space given to you initially to get started with that's why approvals in the default environment technically do not require any database or any capacity or any you know additional aspects to it but in a non-default environment you need the database at least to start using approvals you don't need premium licensing but you need the database and i think that's a very key point that it's very important to understand uh having said all of this as well in microsoft dataverse for teams i did a series on this so in there if you actually trigger approvals it doesn't trigger immediately because you know what happens with the back end it's a new environment i am creating an approval action so there's a job that runs that starts creating those approval tables so that you can start interacting and start creating those approval actions so it's very important to understand how approvals truly works and uh does it require premium licensing no does it require a database yes depends upon the environment in which you're creating the flow all right uh next question our last question before we go to live q and pre we are right on time check that out why not okay so for developers apart from the free trials that we spoke about earlier is there any way they can utilize premium features like custom connectors um you know they're developing they're testing custom connectors premium connectors um you know stuff like the ai builder maybe is there anything is there a plan that that they can utilize for this they have a community plan so community plan gives them premium access but again premium connector access but uh rpa business process flows ai builder these are not included as part of the community plan but they can go try out with premium features and another thing with community plan is it is just for developer environments only it's not it's not intended to use for production databases perfect thank you priya so these covered are seated questions and i wanted to give my subscribers the first privilege to to ask those questions uh now we come to live q a so if you've asked the question before i recommend you to ask the question again because i'm going to start from the bottom i think the chat has gone crazy uh i see a lot of folks answering questions there's i see carsten hi carson i see krishna hi krishna there's there was dan earlier as well so so hello everyone and sorry if i missed someone uh so let's try and take live q a uh the first question here and i and i like this one actually priya is from it's from raja it's great to hear that one premium license will give 10 gb of capacity because that's the first one i'm acquiring in my tenant is there any documentation link for this yeah there is so the licensing documentation and i'm looking at it right now so if you go to see power platform licensing documentation uh in that there is a very specific section about database capacity and that talks about this this limit so look for database database capacity uh in licensing documentation perfect i put the link in the chat i put the link to that licensing guide that i think that 100 pager okay uh it's only 30 pages it's not bad okay this is not a question but a but a good point that phil highlighted and and i wanted to bring that up is that the community plan has now been rebranded and renamed it's now called the developer plan so so thank you phil for for uh highlighting that and it's important for folks to know that uh it is called the the developer plan okay uh looking at additional questions um here's a question from from krishna krishna is asking if my app is using the per app plan so i'm assuming this is power apps per app and it is shared with 20 000 users am i good to purchase one per app plan or do i need to purchase a license for all 20 000 users so the per app plan krishna is per user as i kind of stressed it it just per app per user so in this case uh every user would need that premium license uh so if it's just one app you can buy the five dollar license effective october first and you can assign that to your 20 000 users assuming your app uses premium connectors if it does not the standard licensing will suffice okay uh here is a question again uh this is from bajirao peshwa we have some royal treatment here as well what will happen if a user uh who uses uh the standard who has standard connector access so let's say a user with a standard license what happens if they use premium actions for more than 90 days i'm assuming this is being related to the trial player what happened was beyond 90 days will it stop or ask for a license upgrade what's going to happen to that app or that flow um there is like if it is an admin trial it will stop and it will ask you to upgrade uh it won't and there is a easy way to convert the trial environments into production environments too so you won't lose any work but if it is a user trial today we allow multiple renewals so you can get additional but that don't bank on it like razer said those things can stop at any point of time only by only plan for the first 90 days today you can extend it i think one more time um but don't like we would highly recommend you to go buy a premium license if that is a business critical flow for you okay moving on to the next one this one's from again i'm just randomly picking questions guys i know there's a lot of questions coming in and uh we have a time limit so i'm going to try and respect that uh one way thing i want to call out right away is priya and i will still answer your question so once i close this live session uh the video would be on my youtube channel so you can go into comments and ask your questions there priya has actually volunteered to come and answer questions there as well so a double thank you to priya for that so if you want to uh if if i don't cover your question here don't be disappointed you can go to the to my channel go to the video and just post the question there and i and priya will try and answer as much as we can okay and we have one week to do so yeah that's a time limit for that okay so here's a question from martin uh what about our apps for teams and custom connectors using azure api do we need a premium license or a capacity for that i think i'll take this data was for teams when i covered those sessions if you're building using dataverse for teams if you use azure api management and publish your custom connectors they are treated as standard connectors inside database for teams environments in that case you do not need a premium license however you need to bear the cost of the azure the azure cost won't be free so you'll have to pay for that but you do not need a premium license great question all right moving on to the next question which i think is a good one for priya is there a limit on pagination uh count does that count as api so for example if i'm paginating through a bunch of records like here you go 10 000 records uh is that counted in my api calls as well yes pagination uh adds more api calls this is something we covered in one of the previous slides right yes just like loops variation also because it is grabbing multiple times uh it adds up to that api calls perfect uh a question here from from david that was answered by carson but i wanted to highlight it on the call is what's the cost of that community plan or which is now called developer plan is there is there a price associated with it no it's free so you heard it it's a free plan which every user have it can go and sign up for it's per user they can go sign up they get their own environment i believe the only thing they can't do there literally is sharing apart from that they can use any of the premium actions build custom connectors everything for free so you heard that right it's free okay next question uh i think i'm going to bring this up is from amir it's a it's a good point and i think and i think uh priya is working on something so maybe she can throw a light on that here oh and many people have this question for you is that i wish the licensing was simpler right uh api calls premium licenses which connectors am i using am i using seated license am i using a combination of things here so the question here is what is the future can we have like a magic documentation guide wherein i can just plug something in and it just tells me that here's the output okay magic documentation guide that plugs that's interesting so there is something that i am working on to uh because i have been hearing these questions time and time again i want to update our documentation and answer a bunch of these questions there so that's this is something that i promised my linkedin users said we'll go answer every single licensing question in that document so that's really the goal uh and that i plan to publish it in the next couple of months um so that's coming in but it does not give you that plug-and-play you cannot type in a scenario and it tells you how many so that's a little tough to do that's a little far off okay yeah but i think the question here is slightly different to its like one thing is we can address with documentation uh what it tells us like here is our complex licensing and here is a documentation on how you can understand it i think the question was more like why can i have just more simpler plans um that is something we are looking for feedback how would you like it so please feel free to comment it on the youtube uh post here because i would love to know what makes sense to you what makes it easier for you to understand and see if we can change things around to meet that and i think i think communication and documentation are two key aspects here like like you just mentioned today 10 gb when you create your first i did not know that i'll be very honest with you i had no clue about that so that makes me really happy so i think uh you know if we have if we have clear documentation uh and q and a style documentation like we are doing right here i think i think that would really connect with with the audience all right uh i promise i'll take as many questions as we can so after going ahead here uh here's a question from manish we have 80 users with 2000 api for the day so i'm assuming your users have standard licensing each user gets 2 000 api calls in a 24 hour period so manish is kind of calculating that and saying okay we have 60 000 total but only two people are owning flows maybe there are only two accounts that are creating flows so those two accounts can only have maximum of six thousand sorry four thousand so manish wrong man okay uh why can't those remaining api calls be applied to the owners is the question um so that means that like today api calls are not pooled so dataworks capacity is pooled at the current level but api calls are very specific for the user and there is a real need for it so if i like if i and razer or both the same tenant and if you are if we pull our api request reza is a heavy user he creates a video every single day he creates a bunch of flows and he goes up and uses up the entire pool now i go try to run my flow i don't have any actions left and my flow will perpetually be through throttled all the time so to give users that uh container where they can go execute their flows without being impacted by other users the api requests are not pulled and it is per user again the licenses that you bought is per user so it has to be to buy a particular use user perfect so it's not pooled it is per user period all right next question which is which which i feel is a good question here from sheila murray i hope i'm pronouncing your name right so it looks like the action count and usage so basically when i went to the flow analytics to count how many api calls are consumed the question is it's not immediate uh how long is the wait time before i can see the action count um i i believe the answer is up to 48 hours uh yeah so i can double check that is it 24.48 i think it is 48 but there is a delay absolutely because it needs to propagate into multiple data pipelines to show there perfect all right next question here is from murphy uh will microsoft release any grandfather license for new users uh no grandfather by definition is something that we no longer will allow to purchase we will support like for example you already have a plan you signed a contract five years ago we won't change that on you now but we will support you until the end of the agreement but after that you will not be able to renew not by the by the older licenses yeah all right moving on to the next question uh for power apps this is from rk for power apps is the licensing model does it behave the same for a canvas app or a portal powerapps portals require dataworks data versus premium so by design portals are premier you need premium licensing for portals in fact portals kind of goes beyond the premium licensing realm as well it depends if it's for anonymous access it's for authenticated external access there are different layers to licensing for portals so if you are using powerapps portals period you need premium licensing if you're using a canvas app it depends it depends whether the app is using standard connectors or it has any premium connector so the answer to it is the classic it depends but portals are definitely a premium uh action so it's very very important to to understand that okay uh looking at the next question uh i think uh i'm gonna i like this question i really like this question a lot in fact uh i had asked this question in one of the mvp calls i remember this long back uh when the api calls were well limits were being introduced so adrian is asking this question if a user triggers a flow from powerapps do the api counts count towards the user who's calling the flow or the person who created the flow because powerapps add instant flows run in the context of the user who is invoking it is the users api elements that are going to be counted against it yeah say if it is automatic scheduled whoever uses it how many ever people go update like upload new items into sharepoint the owners say limits will be like all the orders limits will be drawn from perfect okay next question it's from anup kumar uh i'm just gonna take two or three more questions guys so here's the question from anub any scenario we can think of having license for only one common service account rather than having it for all users so the reason why i bought this question up is because what many folks end up doing priya is well uh i'm not gonna license all my accounts i'll just create one service account give it the premium license uh get the nice 10 gb capacity that you told me and uh on top of that i will build all my flows using that service account so the question is what challenges can they run into like even if this was the intention that's that's my follow-up question i would say the intention of service account is to enable business continuity without being tied to people as in case they leave organization or etc um it is not intended to be used as a way to reduce the number of licenses so i think i understand you want to reduce the number of licenses and we want to make money we do not want you to reduce the number of licenses we want you to buy per user licenses the thing that you would run into with service accounts though you wouldn't still need to give it a per user license means that you get that api limits like the 5000 uh api limits you will be now all of your flows once it reaches that limits will start getting throttled that is the problem you would run into perfect okay moving on to the next question uh again a good question this one is from abu bakr i have been using a premium connector using so in the past he had a app or a flow which connected to as azure sql it's been running for more than four years will it stop working because um you know now sql is a premium connector what happens to a sql connection i made four years ago and the app on the floor is still running what will happen in future yeah the reason why it is still running is because you are on the grandfathered plan and until the tenure ends for the grandfather plan that will continue to work but once that agreement expires uh it will it will become a premium and you would have to pay for it perfect all right and now i'll take one last question this is from yoga if i create a flow but the flow is never run i believe that one does not get charged for it so i'm assuming this is more around let's say not licensing but uh maybe api calls in that sense yes it won't get charged but but crea what about licensing i want to create a flow that uses a premium connector but the flow never runs this is the so the plans that we have today are prepaids that means that you have to buy ahead of time it doesn't matter whether flow runs or not once it is assigned to that user they are free to create unlimited plans there are no refunds like because they haven't created flows or haven't used that there is no um we don't offer any more uh refunds just because of that perfect and many folks asked for the licensing guide so i've just pasted that pasted that link in the chat window you can reach out to priya you can reach out to me this video will be live uh will be uh available on youtube so you can binge watch it later later you can ask your questions in the chat uh we were in the comments basically so we'll try and answer those those questions as well and uh i think we had a fantastic audience of consistently over a hundred so uh thank you everyone for joining us and uh thank you again priya for for taking time out and on a weekend uh it 8 30 a.m pacific that's really early so uh on a weekend so thank you once again i hope you enjoyed this session i hope the questions were simple yeah they were and and please feel free to ask more complex questions because sometimes these things make us think okay should we make sure make a change so that it becomes easier so please feel free to ask questions uh thank you again for showing up and asking so many questions we will go back and answer every single one of them um please feel free to ask more questions in the first week because first week we will absolutely answer uh thank you so much razer for giving me this opportunity um really enjoyed that session thank you thank you priya and for uh for all uh folks here live with reza this is the this was the last session for this season uh i did six live sessions now uh i hope you all enjoyed it uh thank you i will come back i promise i'll come back with another season i'll plan some good content uh and i will come back dan christian and reza durrani are planning a live show on fridays we are in planning right now so you will hear more about it soon uh in the meanwhile of course uh i'll be posting videos like crazy so keep following and thank you so much once again uh see y'all like share and subscribe i i am very sorry to ask that so thank you thank you all right thank you everyone bye bye

Channel: Reza Dorrani

Views: 7,593

Rating: 4.9584775 out of 5

Keywords: power apps licensing explained, powerapps licensing, power automate licensing explained, power automate license limits, power automate license comparison, power automate license api calls, microsoft power apps licensing, power apps, power apps plans, power apps pricing, power platform, powerapps licensing guide, powerapps per app plan, power app premium, how much does powerapps cost, power apps licensing, licensing, powerapps license, flow licensing guide, microsoft, powerapps

Id: E7T9xipjXfE

Length: 79min 34sec (4774 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021