Power Apps Monitor

Have you encountered a situation where the app that you have developed is slow or has some issues? Or have you been in a situation where you have been asked to look at the existing apps to resolve some bugs and performance issues?

We might need a way to first identify the issue. And if you are starting to dive into the formulas of different controls to solve the issue, trust me your job just got more difficult.

So then how are we going to overcome this issue?

Monitor

Monitor, eh? What is that?

It is a tool within the Power Apps that offers users (us) to view events from a user's session in the app to diagnose and troubleshoot problems. The monitor tool is available for both canvas and model driven apps. I will be focusing on canvas apps in this article.

With canvas apps you can use the monitor tool while building the app or monitor published apps during runtime.

In my case, I want to look at an app that I have already built. You can find the monitor in the advanced tools tab.

Once you have started a monitor session, all the actions that you do in the App are monitored.

Let's say that I want to have a better understanding of all the network calls that are being made with the app. I could then filter the results to the network category.

And when you select a particular even grid the panel shows additional details about that event.

Details: Shows a high-level overview of the event that you selected

Formula: It shows the related formula for that selected event.

Request: Shows the HTTP request that was sent.

Response: Shows the HTTP request that was received.

If your app has warnings/errors or the flow that you trigger from the app doesn't run due to bad request etc. All these details are recorded as events in the app.

Takeaways:

1. The monitor tool gives you a quick overview of the events that occur in your app.
2. It helps you filter down the events that you are interested in.
3. It gives you more information about an event in terms of what is the formula used in that control, and what is the request sent and response received.
4. Debugging becomes a lot easier with this tool.
5. Please keep in mind that this tool will only be available(for canvas apps) if you have an environment admin or maker.