Machine timeout

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Posted on by Blurryface

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Hi,

We have a timeout set on our machines for 15 minutes of inactivity - is there any actions on PAD that allows the machine to remain ‘active’ whilst running a desktop flow?

I’ve tried using UI element clicks and key strokes to see if that would trigger the machine to stay online. Our flow runs take 20 minutes to process so they flow keeps failing as the machine logs off during the flow run.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Nived_Nambiar 18,138 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @Blurryface

Are you running flow as attended or unattended mode ?

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Srini007 3,490 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @Blurryface

Either you choose Unattended license so that even the machine go on idle it will try to login

OR

You can set in your machine only go to start and search for power,sleep and battery settings->Screen and sleep settings and set the turn off or sleep after settings to your requirement

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If this reply answers your question or solves your issue, please ACCEPT AS SOLUTION

Thanks,

Srini

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Your machine should not be idle when the flow runs. Even if you just have your flow waiting on something, it should technically still be running the PA service.

Are you perhaps running it attended on the machine itself by launching the flow from the PAD console?

What does your flow do exactly?

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Blurryface 149 on at

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Unattended

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Blurryface 149 on at

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Flows are running unattended on a windows 2019 server - regardless of what the flow is doing it times out after 15 minutes and sends an error back to the cloud.
{"error":{"code":"SessionEndedUnexpectedly","message":"The session running desktop flows ended unexpectedly."}}

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Pavel_NaNoi 1,074 on at

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Mind testing something for me just in-case?
Could you create a simple desktop flow with a 20 minute wait inside it and just tell your flow to run that unattended on that server? See if that procures the same time-out error, that would kill any notion that this could be desktop-flow related.

If you do indeed get the same thing, I'd recommend trying to use the following:
(Note you haven't mentioned any of the following that you've used so I assume you haven't)
-Send Mouse Click with move mouse to x,y (0,0) with high speed animation at some point in your flow
-Send Keys with text as hardware keys enabled (Try something like ALT+Tab, maybe that will work)
-Otherwise you're gonna have to talk to your IT team about potentially removing the 15 minute idle restriction or just provisioning a separate VM

Hope this helps somehow.

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GirishJagoo 2 on at

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Hello,

what if the user uses a service account instead of a user account?

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