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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Unattended flow or att...
Power Automate
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Unattended flow or attended flow on always-on VM?

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Posted on by 401

Looking for arguments for and against both solutions:

 

1. Running an unattended flow ($50+$150/month) on a decent Azure VM that is switched on and off automatically (a few dollars)

 

2. Running an attended flow ($50/month) on a decent always-on Azure VM ($100/month)

 

Disclosure: I am not an Azure VM expert and I may be misunderstanding something here. Same goes for the pricing model... maybe I'm missing something.

 

Nevertheless, at first glance, seems like option 2 would be best: I can have several attended UI flows running in sequence on the always-on VM without incurring any additional costs, whereas I would have to pay an extra $150 for each additional unattended flow.

 

The reason I would leave the VM on and signed in all the time for the attended flow is to avoid manually singing in every time I need a flow to be run. 

 

Please do not hesitate to correct any of my possibly incorrect assumptions. Looking forward to different viewpoints! 

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  • fraenK Profile Picture
    2,125 on at

    As said in the other thread, you have to trigger attended flows manually (limitation of PAD means to start) because it is meant to run im sequence with a physical user present. 

     

    Whereas unattended flows can run in parallel on one machine within multiple sessions "in the dark" without any user intervention.

     

    So when planning to automate a process, you have to think about if it should assist you during your work at your screen (attended) or just handle the work autonomously somewhere else (unattended).

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