Easier Flow Management with Flow Studio

If you follow my blog then you know that I am a big user and fan of Microsoft Flow. As much as I love Flow there are a few things here and there from the management side of things that I find myself wishing I could do. Luckily, John Liu has created a powerful Flow extension tool called Flow Studio which helps bridge the gap. In this post, I’m going to highlight some of my favorite features of Flow Studio.

#1 – Sort and Filter your Flows

This is such a timer saver when it comes to managing your Flows, especially if you have a lot of Flows in your environment. The normal Flow screen only surfaces up the Name of your Flow, Last Modified and Type information. The only thing you can do is search for a flow, you can’t sort or filter.

This is where Flow Studio shines. Look at all of the metadata it surfaces up about your Flow with the ability to sort and filter by:

From this one screen you can quickly see how many runs and failures your Flows have had, the number of actions in your Flows and which ones have the most number of runs. Also, Flow Studio gives you the ability to Tag your Flows and filter by that tag.

#2 – Deploy Flows

This is a new feature in Flow studio and it’s a game changer. The deploy functionality allows you to take a Flow and deploy it to another location. I can’t count how many times I’ve built a Flow for something, say to move attachments in SharePoint lists to a Document Library, and wished I could easily apply that same Flow to several other SharePoint lists. With Flow Studio’s Deploy functionality you can do just that!

Flow Deploy lets you create Plans where you map your Source Flow and the Destination. Once you do the mapping, a wizard runs and evaluates anything in your source Flow that you would want to change. In the case of my Flow, it lets me update the URL and List name to associate my Flow with and get the attachments from. Just click Run Plan and it will deploy the new Flow for you.

#3 – Mass Cancel and Re-submit Flow Runs

I know I can’t be the only one who has ran into an issue when working on a Flow that made several Flow runs fail. When you have 20+ failed Flows you need to cancel or re-submit it can be a pain to have to go into each individual run to cancel. With Flow Studio, you can see all of the Flow runs, select all and mass cancel and re-submit those Flow runs.

There are so many more additional features of Flow Studio that I could go on about, the ability to edit the JSON, easily canceling Flow Approvals, etc. If you are using Flow heavily then Flow Studio is a great tool to have in your toolbox. There’s a free version which you can do all of the sorting and filtering I talked about and a paid version which gets you more admin features and is very reasonably priced.

If you want to learn more about Flow Studio check out the website: https://flowstudio.app