This is a series on the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence starter Kit, and the various Apps, Dashboards, and Features that are included in it. The topic of this post is to discuss the Power Platform Admin View App.

At the core of the Starter kit, the Power Platform Admin View App is designed to be a centralized location for Administrators to be able to view what is occurring inside the Power Platform. This app allows administrators to get a quick view of the different types of assets deployed across all environments, and provide the who, what, where, when information on these assets.

The Admin view starts out with an Overview Dashboard, which provides quick insights about your Makers, your environments, and assts, which you can then Drill down into, to get even more insights about what is occurring in your tenant

Monitor

Each area of the Monitor section functions in a similar manner, so I won’t cover each one, in depth, but it’s important to know the areas the the CoE will cover. These areas are: PowerApps Apps, Flows, Environments, Connectors, Chatbots, Desktop Flows, Power Pages Sites, Audit Logs, Business Process Flows, and Solutions. You’ll notice there is one MAJOR leg missing from all of this, and that’s PowerBI. This is due to the fact that PowerBI’s Workspace architecture is wholly different from the Power Platform’s Environment architecture. I’m hopeful Microsoft will one day consolidate this, either on the back end, or at least through the CoE, to give us a total view of the Power Platform.

As a start, I’m going to use the PowerApps Apps view. This will provide us an example of the structure of each view, and what we can do with them.

As you can see, with this view we can see all of the PowerApps Apps in our tenant, across all environments. By clicking on “All Apps”, we can change the current view to some of the various pre-built views that Microsoft provides (i.e. Canvas Apps, SharePoint Forms, or Orphaned Apps). This can help Admins find problematic assets very quickly in order to remediate them. Now because this ia Model App, we also get some very handy built in tools to work with this Data, such as exporting it out to Excel, Building Charts on-the-fly, and even spinning up custom Flows to help automate custom tasks that Admins may want to have in place.

If we click on the name of an App, we can see specific details about the App:

From here, we get some really good information about this app, like when it was created, the types of Connections it’s using, and who it’s shared with. This can be extremely valuable for governing these apps, as knowing who’s using them and what data it’s reading/writing can ensure you know what your Citizen Developers are up to.

On the Audit tab of this info, we can see specific information related around the Compliance of this app. As a part of the CoE starter kit, we have the ability to require our Citizen developers to provide specific information around the asset they’ve created (i.e. Business Justification for creating the app, the types of users who will be using it, etc, and this area allows admins to view and edit this information as well).

The information for this tab is collected from several different areas of the CoE starter kit, depending on what you may have installed and configured as a part of the installation. The majority of this information is collected from the Developer Compliance Center.

In addition to the General and Audit Sections, there is also a “Related Area”, that provides information around the Audit Logs (if you have installed the optional Auditing solution of the CoE Starter kit.), Feedback from the App Catalog, and you can also get a view into what solutions this specific asset may be a part of.

Developer Compliance Center

As alluded to above, Developer Compliance Center is a Canvas App that allows your Makers to submit information about the App that is useful for CoE Admins to understand why and asset has been created and ensure that Citizen Developers stay in Compliance with their assets.

Citizen Developers can come into this app, and submit their Business Justification, Business Impact, Dependencies, and Mitigation plan for any App, Flow, Chatbot, or Form they may have deployed to the Power Platform. These fields are also customizable and since all of these App are built on the power Platform, the process can be fully modified to meet your individual organizational process to ensure your Citizen Developers stay in compliance.

While a lot of the information provided by the Power Platform Admin view can feel overwhelming, these tools truly provide a very detailed view into the assets your Citizen Developers are creating. Don’t be afraid to tailor the governance and development of the platform to conform to your organization and culture. and if you get into a bind, feel free to reach out me at jo.karnes@centricconsulting.com, and find out how I can assist you with your Power Platform journey!