Some asked me recently how does my SaaS product Power Clarity work with Microsoft’s Center of Excellence kit.

We can look at this from two directions:

• Turnkey Governance with Power Clarity (running without CoE)

• Enhanced Governance with Power Clarity (running with CoE)

• ALM with Power Clarity

Center of Excellence kit (CoE)

I’m a big fan of CoE built by Microsoft and the community. I love that Microsoft acknowledges there is a need for governance, and the community rises to build tools to help. CoE starter kit is a collection of resources that will be a template to create your own Center of Excellence kit.

Power Clarity is a turnkey solution - you grant your credentials, it starts scanning. You get dashboards, forms and reports and workflows. I want to stress that Power Clarity is an enhanced version of Flow Studio - something I’ve been building since 2018, so it was developed in parallel to CoE, there are similarities, which leads to how they can be used together.

Here’s a list of roadmap on our first year (2020).

Turnkey Governance with Power Clarity (running without CoE)

If you are a company using the power platform and has not developed or deployed CoE - then Power Clarity can be used as a turnkey starting point.

If you don’t know where to start, or how to build one, we will get you started quickly to help you uncover the platform.

If you don’t have a power governance solution, and need one in 15 minutes, we are your… service.

• No install - we manage it and keep improving it.
  Power Clarity is a SaaS service so the constant improvements are baked into the subscription. (In my opinion, we aren’t very expensive either).

• Add one or many concurrent scanning accounts

• Use accounts that are not administrator accounts - Power Clarity can scan with or without admin permissions, or operating in mix mode between different environments. If you have environment admin - you can see everything. If you only has environment maker - you can still monitor assets that you own.

• Power Clarity performs hourly scanning, because it’s an incremental scanner and very light on API access. We understand at high API throughput - both source and storage can get upset. Power Clarity incremental scanning of a tenant of 1000 (flows/apps) is typically less than 3 minutes.

• Power Clarity does not require premium accounts

Enhanced Governance with Power Clarity

If you have CoE deployed and already has CDS entities - then Power Clarity can be used to greatly enhance that data collection exercise.

You no longer need to worry about ‘how the data is collected’, but can keep customizing your reporting and utilization of that data to drive your governance outcomes.
In fact, we give you more events, signals, and policy actions you can perform. We want you to have clarity.

• Writes to Azure Storage Table and CDS Entities (use Power Clarity to collect data instead of CoE’s admin sync flows)

  (Note: CDS write requires the scanning account to have Premium license for CDS access)

• Deep API reads into Flows - runs, run actions, run errors and remediation

• Recall run metadata beyond 30 days

• When events happen - you can get an email report, or get a webhook call so you can handle it yourself. Power Clarity provides complete tenant flow error reporting without try/catch pattern. Since it’s inception, Power Clarity is a Flow monitoring service as well as a Power Platform governance service.

• Advanced detection of cross tenant resources

• Advanced detection of flows utilizing premium licenses

• Advanced count of flows utilizing API rate limits

• White and black list filtering of resources (domains, URLs) and connectors

• Clash detection of flows and DLP policies

• Clash detection of flows using deprecated actions

Application Lifecycle Management with Power Clarity

Because Power Clarity maintains offline granted access, it can perform advanced active actions to the Power Platform on your behalf, actions that don’t currently have an connector.

• Flow Studio’s migrate feature (which lets us copy, switch connections and deploy flows), can be invoked from Clarity API call

• Call Power Platform management cmdlets via Power Clarity API.

• Continuous backup of flow definitions and Power Apps snapshots

• Power Clarity provides an advanced GraphQL view of the entire data set available within its stores.

• Read and reports on managed and unmanaged resources in Solutions

• History of changes across the entity tracking

See it for yourself

Send me an email john.liu at flowstudio.app to get started.