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Find out why Flow stopped

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Posted on by Smon

I have a flow which shall run continuously but sometimes stops. Winautomation always displayed the reason which made debugging easy, for example "Error in action #5 in Main". Isn't there a similar feature in Power Automate?

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Power Automate Desktop

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @Smon

This will need to add some own error handling mechanism with the help of ‘Get last error’ action that stores the details of the last occurred error in a variable.

With the help of "On block error" this variable can be written to an error log file or an email whenever an error occurs.

And yes this gives the line number and the action where the error occurred.

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CU-19081228-9 on at

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@VJR @Smon I'd like to jump in here if I may with a similar issue.

I have a browser automation flow, it runs fine most of the time, but there are times when it will just stop.

When it does it's like someone automatically pressed the flow stop button. There are no errors or anything like that.

I use 'Get Last Error' and 'On Error Blocks' in my flow and I reviewed them when the flow just stopped by itself, and they all look fine, meaning there is no specific error occurring that might explain why it should have just stopped.

Is there any way I can dig deeper on this? Thanks so much!

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @ianwuk

A few more troubleshooting checks.

- Check the Windows Event log viewer to see if something's gone wrong there

- Check if anything's fishy in the Services (Type services.msc in Run window) and check anything related to Power Automate (haven't checked which ones.)

- Antivirus or Firewall blocking something at a particular time?

- What does your logging mechanism say? Does it stop at the exact same action? At a particular time of the day? While accessing Excel, while reading or writing the webpage, while using Sendkeys, Image based automation, While activating a window, etc? Identify patterns.

- Is it triggered from a Cloud Flow? If so does it run fine always when running from the console of the Desktop application...and so forth.

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CU-19081228-9 on at

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Thank you for replying @VJR - I'll try and answer your questions.

- Check the Windows Event log viewer to see if something's gone wrong there - what would I look for specifically?

- Check if anything's fishy in the Services (Type services.msc in Run window) and check anything related to Power Automate (haven't checked which ones.) - Will try that.

- Antivirus or Firewall blocking something at a particular time? - Corporate firewall, always happens around midnight, but this is also wehen the website in question has performance issues. I want to run my PAD flow until midnight, wait 30 minutes, then start again, but I can't seem to figure out how?

- What does your logging mechanism say? Does it stop at the exact same action? At a particular time of the day? While accessing Excel, while reading or writing the webpage, while using Sendkeys, Image based automation, While activating a window, etc? Identify patterns. -The errors are all the same each time, basically my flow checks to see if the webpage displays 'Gateway Timeout' in the event that clicking a button takes too long.

These sections are wrapped in an error block with the error condition being to continue to the end of the block, so, the error will always be reported as long as there is no 'Gateway Timeout' as it can't extract the data from the webpage (due to no Gateway Timeout error to check against) so the error is:

Subflow: main, Action: 1203, Action name: Extract data from web page Error Message: Failed to extract data (web page error while extracting data).

And it happens several times during a flow as the flow completes successfully otherwise.
.
- Is it triggered from a Cloud Flow? If so does it run fine always when running from the console of the Desktop application...and so forth. - It's a desktop flow only, it's triggered when I click Run to start it.

Thanks for all your help.

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VJR 7,635 on at

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I'm slightly confused because the first post said there is no error and that there is no explanation why the flow suddenly stops. But the second post says there is an error "Failed to extract data (web page error while extracting data).

In that case I don't see a valid reason to check the Windows event viewer.

- Double check the Extract data from webpage

- Remove and re-add

- Add Wait stages to give some breathing space before the extraction and for the page to load thoroughly.

- Use Wait for web page content and if the desired element exists only then use Extract data from webpage....(the element that displays 'Gateway Timeout')

- Also check if you can make use of If web page contains anywhere.

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CU-19081228-9 on at

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Thank you for replying @VJR

I apologise for the confusion regarding errors. But this also confuses me too as yes, as I said in the first post, the flow just stops itself, like someone pressing stop. Even though, errors are actually reported, as I mentioned. I guess, what I was expecting was that if the flow stopped for it to throw an error, but it doesn't.

I've since fixed the errors mentioned in the second post, so they are no longer caught. And I am running the flow to see if it stops again and actually gives a proper error to work with this time.

Thanks again for your help and support.

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