Flow Run Duration Monitor and Alert

Overview

The Flow Run Duration Monitor and Alert flow is a scheduled monitoring solution that checks Power Automate flow run durations against configurable SLA thresholds. When any flow run exceeds the defined time limit, it posts a detailed HTML alert to a Microsoft Teams channel — enabling IT admins and developers to quickly identify and investigate slow-running automations before they impact business operations.

Use Case

In enterprise environments with dozens or hundreds of Power Automate flows, long-running executions can indicate performance degradation, API throttling, infinite loops, or upstream system failures. This flow provides proactive SLA monitoring by scanning all active flows, querying recent run history via the Flow Management REST API, calculating actual run durations (including still-running executions), and aggregating any SLA breaches into a single formatted Teams alert.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Scanning all active flows in the environment every hour
• Querying recent run history for each active flow via the Flow Management REST API
• Calculating actual run duration (start-to-end for completed runs, start-to-now for still-running executions)
• Aggregating breaches into a single formatted Teams alert with flow name, run ID, start time, duration, and status

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Create an Azure AD App Registration

Create an app registration with the Flows.Read.All permission (or equivalent) on the Power Automate REST API. Record the Client ID and generate a Client Secret.

Update OAuth environment variables

Set flowlibs_FlowRunMonitorClientId, flowlibs_FlowRunMonitorClientSecret, and flowlibs_FlowRunMonitorTenantId to the values for your app registration and tenant. For production, store the client secret in Azure Key Vault and reference it via a Key Vault env var.

Configure the Teams alert target

Set flowlibs_FlowRunMonitorTeamsGroupId and flowlibs_FlowRunMonitorTeamsChannelId to the team and channel that should receive SLA alerts.

Set the SLA threshold

Adjust flowlibs_FlowRunSLAThresholdMinutes to the maximum run duration you want to tolerate (default is 30 minutes).

Update connection references

Ensure the Power Automate Management and Teams connection references are valid in the target environment.

Turn on the flow

After configuration, change the flow state from Stopped to Started.

Tune the recurrence and run window

Adjust the Recurrence trigger interval (default: 1 hour) for how urgently you need breaches detected, and tweak the HTTP action's $top=10 parameter to inspect more or fewer recent runs per flow.

Add email notifications alongside Teams

In the breach-found branch, add an Outlook Send an email (V2) action after the Teams post to send the same HTML alert by email.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

div(sub(ticks(endTime), ticks(startTime)), 600000000)

div(sub(ticks(utcNow()), ticks(startTime)), 600000000)

@greater(outputs('Calculate_Run_Duration_Minutes'), variables('varSLAThresholdMinutes'))

@equals(item()?['properties/state'], 'Started')