Unattended Job not executing

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Posted on by DB-08101941-0

My team has a process that is not executing on our unattended machine. We followed the process to install a power automate gateway on a VM and assign it a Power Automate Desktop Unnatended license to test out an MVP. This is the first PA Desktop flow on an unattended vm we have tried in the organization.

The problem is as follows

When we run the automation from the orchestrator on unattended mode (meaning it should run on the licensed VM) nothing happens. The run status sits like in the picture below for hours with no action. No log data appears in the orchestrator, no action data. Just the arrows above “execute desktop flow” spinning for hours unless we kill the job.

the problem is occurring with our specific flow on the unattended VM. If we run the bot in attended mode or on my machine then it works fine. If we create a simple dummy flow (open and close google chrome) and run it on the unattended machine it works. But if we execute our Main flow in the unattended VM then it just sits there for hours without completing any actions or writing any log data down. It appears that there is something wrong with the flow in the unattended machine but the lack of trace data makes it difficult to understand what actions are causing the problems.

As part of our troubleshooting we have tried uninstalling and re-installing the PA gateway and we have review the system events to see if there is a problem with the service in the VM or the network.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Deenuji_Loganathan_ 6,250 Moderator on at

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Hi

Currently, a Power Automate gateway is not necessary to run bots in unattended mode, as the Power Automate Desktop app includes a machine registration feature to connect to your cloud orchestrator.

Regarding the information provided, I cannot draw a conclusion. If we examine this through a screen share, I may be able to assist you more effectively.

Points to remember:

1. PA data gateway no longer required to connect your PAD from cloud

2. Unattended license won't work based on VM instead it works based on environment level

Thanks,

Deenu

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eetuRobo 4,519 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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It sounds like something in this particular flow gets stuck or in infinite loop in unattended runs. The action details only get uploaded when the flow has finished. so you wont see what the flow does since it never finishes.

I would troubleshoot with the following methods:

-Make sure your flow does not get in some sort of infinite loop. For example if you have error handling and in unattended mode it gets always in some error and the error handling never stops the flow but just keeps trying to start the flow over and over.

-Unattended run has usually much smaller resolution and maybe something your flow does works fine with attended when the resolution is set what your screen is but when it tries to do it unattended there is a problem and it gets stuck waiting for some element. If you have "Wait for ..." -actions then make sure they have "Fail with timeout error" set to some time so it does not wait infinitely for element that never loads.

-Add "Take screenshot" actions all over the flow so you can see where the flow stops and if there is some popup that makes the flow not continue. If the flow just processes some data without anything being visible in the screen then add "Write text to file" and have the flow write most of the steps it does so you see what step it gets stuck to.

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