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Hello Community,

I am finally kicking the tires around this product but have a concern/question around part of its offering. It would seem that according to the Pricing page, that a single flow can be run every 5 minutes with the Office 365 package. That sounds rather reasonable until you perform the math on that. Every 5 minutes would be 12 per hour, which is 288 per day, which is 8,640 per 30 days.

Looking at the max number of runs per month per user for this plan, it is only 2,000. So if I am understanding this correctly, a single flow (nevermind additional ones) running at the allowed 5 minute interval would only actually be run for nearly a week and then stop functioning under this plan. That is, my business critical workflow would only be available for one of four weeks of the month as it would cease to stop operating due to the max cap of all total flow executions offered under the plan, even though it can execute at a rate that results in a number of executions that is greater than the established maximum cap.

Is my understanding correct here? If so, why allow an interval that results in a number of executions that exceeds the maximum number allowed within a plan? The other confusing part is that this is for a single flow, nevermind additional ones. Very confused here. 🙂

Thank you for any assistance in helping me understand the model here,

Michael

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v-xida-msft on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

Thanks for your feedback, I think you have a misunderstanding in these license plans for Microsoft Flow.

If you use Flow for Office 365 plan, the Maximum flow frequency is 5 minutes. It doesn't mean that your flow always be triggered once per 5 minutes, the flow has its own trigger interval. In addition, the trigger would have its own limits within Microsoft Flow, the trigger would take effect on the trigger interval of the flow.

The Maximum number of runs per month (per user) is 2000, it means that per user per month could only run flow for 2000 times at most. If your company exceeds more than the included runs per month per user, you can buy an additional quota of runs per month. More details about buying an additional quota of runs per month, please check the following article:

https://preview.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/#plan-feature-table

So the Maximum flow frequency feature is based on a single flow run, but the Maximum number of runs per month (per user) feature is based on different license plans of Microsoft Flow. The two features are in different Hierarchies, we could not compare the two features using the way that you mentioned.

Best regards,

Kris

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hi @v-xida-msft thank you for your reply.

> If you use Flow for Office 365 plan, the Maximum flow frequency is 5 minutes. It doesn't mean that your flow always be triggered once per 5 minutes, the flow has its own trigger interval. In addition, the trigger would have its own limits within Microsoft Flow, the trigger would take effect on the trigger interval of the flow.

Can you please provide more context around this or explain this a little differently as I believe this is where my confusion lies. When I hear "flow frequency" to me that means the maximum frequency at which a flow can execute, which is once every 5 minutes. Please keep in mind here that I am a total newb and am not 100% familiar with your product just yet. 🙂 Thank you!

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ChrisC 94 on at

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I think he means maximum, as in the highest rate a flow could run under the scheduled recurrence trigger. Other triggers, i.e. "When an email is received", happen as the action of the trigger happens, and not under any limit or constraint as far as I have found

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Right, OK. I think I am with you... but you can schedule a Flow to execute every x minutes on a schedule/timer, correct? Here is a trigger that I have configured every 1 minute:

https://dragonspark.tinytake.com/sf/MjQ3NjYwMF83NDYyOTQw

So if this is scheduled for every 1 minute, and my plan only allows for every 5 minutes, that means that this Flow will only run once every 5 minutes even though it is scheduled for every 1 minutes, correct?

Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing? Help me out here. 🙂

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ChrisC 94 on at

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It will not let you even save the flow with <5 minute timer unless your flow plan allows it, iirc. I have a premium plan currently so I cannot confirm it for you right now but I believe that is how it works.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Yeah you and I are both in a cloud of confusion here @ChrisC, LOL! I just now tried saving a simple flow that executes every 1minute, and it did indeed do exactly that on my current Office 365 account twice in as many minutes.

FWIW, I just now did see another thread talking about this very topic, but it doesn't really answer the question, either:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Flow-Discussion/Maximum-flow-frequency/m-p/38692#M7551

So, it would seem we are not alone in the confusion here. 🙂

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ChrisC 94 on at

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I'd love this to be cleared up too, @Anonymous lol.

I understandthat the total amount of flow runs are an aggregate as a company, for every user under your domain. Perhaps that is the same functionality in flow frequency field?

i.e. I have one license in the org, I can run 1 flow every 5 minutes. If I have 20 users with a flow license in the company, the org is allowed 20 flows per 5 minutes.

That is my best guess as to how that is working 😛

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Community Power Pla... on at

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OK so @TravisB was awesome enough to check out my account and see exactly what is going on. Even though I have a quota of only 4000 runs for the month, it appears that I have a P2 Trial, which should be 15,000 but for some reason it is 4,000. In any case, I do have a P2 Trial and this is the reason why I am able to run at once per minute at the present moment.

The important part is that we have established that 5 minute "Maximum Flow Frequency" means exactly what we've been discussing and have understood it to mean, which is that one flow can only execute every 5 minutes under the Office 365 plan. That means a single flow can execute approximately 8,640 times per month on this schedule, which is more than four times the limit that is provided in this package (again with only one Flow).

Travis, this seems like an oversight, or that I am still misunderstanding something. If I have two flows, they would execute 17,280 times on the allowed schedule for this plan. That would mean my allotted number of runs at 2000 (assuming a single user) would be used up in approximately 3.5 days, or about 7 days if I only have 1 Flow running at the provided schedule.

I hope I am confused about something still because this really seems seriously miscalculated somewhere. I hope you can help out here and clear up the air, Traivs. 🙂 Thank you again for your assistance!

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ChrisC 94 on at

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Ahh that makes more sense. And I believe the maximum flow frequency only applies to the recurrence flow event.

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TravisB on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

Can you clarify where you're seeing the 4000 number? As you said, if you have a p2 trial it should be contributing 15000 runs toward your tenant cap. If you're seeing 4000 somewhere, then we might have something to look into.

On the topic of flow recurrence and contribution to flow run caps, I admit it's a pretty confusing topic so I hope I can help clear things up!

First, there's a difference between a flow check and a flow run. The 5 minutes / 1 minute values we advertise are for flow checks. So for an o365 user, every 5 minutes we would perform the trigger check operation and if necessary kick off flow runs. So for a trigger like "On a new email" we would be checking every 5 minutes for a new email. If you don't get any new emails over the period of an hour, even though we check every 5 minutes, we won't kick off a flow run so no runs will be counted toward your cap.

On the other hand, if you get 5 emails over that 5 minutes, we'd kick off 5 flow runs (1 for each email). Similarly, if you had a free plan, you would still get 5 runs kicked off for 5 emails, but they would happen later. Effectively with recurrence limits, you're paying for reaction time, not executions.

The exception to this rule is the recurrence trigger in which there's no difference between checks and runs. If you set it to run every minute, it will run every minute. I noticed the flow I was looking at was triggered by the recurrence card so I think this is what you're most interested in. There's a couple answers to this:

1. It's worth noting that your flow run cap is pooled accross a tenant. Generally the number of flow powerusers is going to be substantially less than the number of users with office plans for example. This allows individual users to make use of far more flow runs than allowed by a single license.

2. Unlike polling triggers, where you cannot control the check speed (faster is always better), you can with the recurrence trigger. It's worth looking at your use-case and evaluating whether you get significant value out of running your flow every minute and if not, consider dialing back the recurrence speed.

3. If it turns out that you really do need your flow to run every minute and that you don't have headroom with all the runs pooled in your tenant, then we do offer the option to purchase additional runs.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Travis

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