Maker and Admin Deployment Pages Preview - Better Pipeline Visibility
Power Platform Pipelines have been getting lots of updates and new features since their release 2 years ago. Just recently, we got the ability to hydrate development environments, where the deployments had been done through Pipelines. One gap in the product has been a lack of visibility for Pipelines. This is not a big issue at smaller companies, but when you start to scale up to larger organisations, the lack of visibility for the number of pipelines, host environments, successful deployments, failures etc; has been a little frustrating, especially when we want to shout about why pipelines are so great and how much time they are saving companies. Well that changes today, with the new Preview of Deployment Pages for Makers and Admins.
These new pages will offer makers and admins valuable insights into how deployments are going by environment or tenant wide. Both of these are aimed at different audiences so I went through and looked at each. Here are my thoughts.
Maker Deployment Page
This page can be found by navigating to your environment and then choosing solution. You will see a new tile at the top called "Deployment"
The Maker Deployment screen surfaces information relating to the environment you are in. At the top you can see failed deployments and in-progress deployments. This is important to give development teams visibility of what is currently happening and what has failed.
There is also a drop down where you can filter the results to show pipeline runs from numerous day ranges.
At the bottom, we see the Deployment History, so we can see success or failures and if deployments are in progress, what stage they are up to.
When you select any of these rows, you get a side pane pop out giving you a bit more information regarding the deployment, including the stage if it is in progress.
The only things where I could see some improvement here would be to add a custom filter for date ranges, the ability to filter the history based on any of the columns to especially Pipeline and Solution. Also the failed or active deployment results don't do anything when you click them. I would have liked to have an option to either navigate to that solution deployment or the take me to the Pipeline Deployment Configuration App and run if I have the relevant permissions. But these are minor improvements, this whole page is a vast improvement from having no visibility or needing to go to the Pipeline Configuration Deployment App to get a view of your deployments.
Admin Deployment Page
To get to this view, head over the Power Platform Admin Centre and switch to the new Admin Centre view if you are still using the classic view. The click on the Deployment tab.
You get 3 sub menus in this tab, Overview, Pipelines and Catalogs.
The overview section shows deployment Pending Approvals as well as failed deployments. Clicking on either button shows a list of deployments that either failed or are pending an approval.
This is great because Admins get visibility in the admin centre when things are going wrong and any deployments pending approval. Admins can also approve the deployments straight from here as well by click on the deployment and a side pane pops out, allowing them to approve or reject a deployment.
The only problem I've found while testing this is that it does not seem to filter by approval in a deployment pipeline, instead this shows me all approvals that have been sent to me, regardless of a pipeline 😱 Not sure if that's by design or a by-product or creating an approval in the same environment where my custom host pipeline is installed, but this could cause some issues to beware.
Looking at failed deployments, you can see a list of them and this menu does allow you to filter and sort (YAY 🥳) and selecting any of them pops out another side pane giving you more details about the failure.
Again at the top of this page, you can filter by numerous dates and get more or less data.
The thing I like the most about this page is the ability to filter by Pipeline Host!! Not only this, but it differentiates between Custom Hosts and Platform Host. The great thing about this is that, if you have a large organisation, you can see where the Deployment Configuration App is installed and where Pipelines are being used. Previously you would need a COE starter kit or other governance tooling to find this app and pull data about pipeline usage so this is fantastic!!
The Pipelines section shows Pipelines and Run history for the Pipeline environment you are looking at. You get the same filters at the top as the previous section.
This is more of a view taken from the Deployment Configuration App, but allows you to quickly flick between Custom Hosts and the Platform Hosts to see the settings enabled for the Pipelines. Clicking on a pipeline shows the settings in a side pane.
The Run History on this section gives you the same view as when we looked at the history in the Maker Deployment Page, the only difference is the ability to filter the columns here.
A couple of improvements I'd like to see here, some custom charts, showing successful, failed, cancelled pipelines. Realtime reporting, showing how many are pending approval, deploying, in other pre-deployment steps but for ALL pipelines and not just a single environment.
Overall, I love these improvements!! Giving admins more visibility on the usage and adoption of Pipelines is great and this allows them to try and step in and help when they see things failing or not working as they should. Looking forward to seeing what the team bring out next 👀
Ciao for now
MCJ