If you have any kind of responsibility for the Power Platform in your company, chances are you’ll be needing access to the Power Platform Admin Centre.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the basics and what you need to know to get you started.
Table of Contents
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I’ve worked with companies that won’t allow an install of the Power Platform Centre of Excellence Starter Kit. Having it would be great. But, the Power Platform admin center has enough info, settings, and tips to keep you going. In some cases, the CoE Starter Kit is a test-bed for features that will go into the Admin centre. So, it’s all good.
When the Power Platform Admin Centre came online in 2016, there was very little you could do. These days though, you can manage many parts of your Power Platform. Microsoft keeps adding more admin features. It’s your first line of defense. It’s out-of-the-box for monitoring activity, licensing, features, data policies, and a lot more.
More recently, the admin centre is also referred to as P-PAC or PPAC. It’s definitely less of a mouthful than the full title. All the cool kidz are calling it PPAC now, so you’ll see us using that acronym a fair bit.
Access
Firstly, the account you’ll be using for Power Platform administrative duties needs the Power Platform Administrator role in Microsoft 365.
In the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, you can select a user and click on Manage roles:
Expand Show all by category to expose the Power Platform Administrator role:If your account has the Global Administrator role within your Microsoft 365 tenant, you’ll have the Power Platform Administrator role by default. In the spirit of principle of least privilege, it’s your responsibility to ensure your admin account only has access to what it needs.
With the right role assigned, you can access PPAC in a number of ways:
1- From the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, select All admin centres then choose either Power Apps or Power Automate; they both take you to the same place. Wish they’d update the product logos here 🙄
2- Directly at the URL of https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/
3- Or, made even simpler, use https://aka.ms/ppac. That will redirect you to the link above.
Home page
The landing page of PPAC is also one of the most important. You can customise to add various cards to give you high-level information quickly. The two most critical in my opinion are Service Health and Message Centre.
Service Health will give you any oversight of service outages, for example Power Apps might not be working globally.
You’d expect to see any such event shown here. It allows you to start talking about your business and let makers and users know. Meanwhile, Message Centre gives you a heads up for any updates. It also covers new features or deprecations on the Power Platform. Again, this is to allow you as a Power Platform Administrator to help spread the word as soon as possible.Down the left hand side you’ve got your main navigation menu for PPAC. Some of these options will get their own articles in the weeks to come as there’s a lot to unpack. For now, we’ll just go over each section at a high level.
Environments
You’ll find all your Power Platform environments here. Depending on what settings you have enabled or disabled, this could be a combination of different environment types. You can use the column headers in the view to sort or filter:
Clicking on an environment name will take you to the settings for that environment. Here we can view and edit certain properties, define security, configure audit logs and more. This is something we’ll cover in more depth in a later article, as there is LOTS to cover here that needs a deep dive:
Analytics
There are currently four areas for Analytics in the Power Platform Admin Centre; Dataverse, Power Automate, Power Apps and Data export. For Dataverse, Power Automate and Power Apps, analysis is for a maximum of the previous 31 days. You’re not currently able to extract information going back any further.
The Dataverse page shows high-level stats. It has data on active users, API calls, system jobs, and more. A lot of these seem to be system jobs but it depends on your overall Dataverse use. You can use the tabbed menu across the top to change analytical view.
It’s not hugely clear, but there will be an environment and date range selected by choice. You can change this just under the tabbed menu. You will need to know the URL of the environment you want to select. So, if you don’t have a good URL naming convention, that could be fun 😊.
Selecting Download at the top of the page presents lots of pre-canned reports you can download to a csv extract:
For Power Automate and Power Apps, there’s an embedded Power BI report. Both options have a Parent & Child tabbed menu showing different analysis you can view. As with Dataverse, to view a different environment you can change the filters:
The reports can take a while to load sometimes, but retain all the usual Power BI functionality such as exporting data for a particular graphic/tile, or clicking on a bar to filter the rest of the report:
The Data export option in the Analytics section relates to managing exports to Azure Data Lake or Azure App Insights. I’ve never done anything with either of these but they are well documented here.
Billing
At present, there’s only one option here – licenses. Everyone’s favourite Power Platform topic 😂.
This part of the Power Platform Admin Centre gives you summaries of all key license types, like Power Apps Premium and Power Automate Premium. This is the only place to view Power Apps Per App and Power Automate Process license use.
Choosing a license in the Licensing summary box will show a detailed view below it. You can export these to Excel too:In my recent findings with clients, this isn’t always the most accurate data when it comes to analysing Per App licenses, so do keep that in mind. Until recently this was still a preview feature; it’s a huge improvement on what we had in the past (which was, erm, nothing) so this is a step in the right direction for sure.

Settings
Another area that will warrant its own deep-dive article. For now, this area is home to key tenant-wide settings. You can choose to turn them on or off for your Power Platform estate.
Some settings are on by default, such as the Copilot ones. If you try to turn them off, they’ll just turn themselves back on again 😜. Other settings, such as creation of Trial or Developer environments, are set here too.
Resources
A couple of useful things are here. It’s worth covering them from a Power Platform Admin Centre point of view.
The Capacity tab gives a good high-level overview of what your database storage levels are like. The more user licenses purchased, the higher capacity you’ll have. The analysis here is good, helping you focus on environments that use lots of capacity. These environments may need looking into. More information about the capacity storage model is available here.
A small but key setting is in the top right of the Summary screen, called View self-service sources. If your company has self-service licensing turned on, some users may have bought their own Power Platform licenses. This will add a small amount of storage for each one. You’ll be able to view any such Power Platform purchases here:
It’s worth engaging with your wider Microsoft 365 admins about self-service licensing. Is it enabled? What’s the company stance? You can find out more about the topic here, which includes reference for how you can turn it off too (using PowerShell).
The Dynamics 365 apps tab lists all the app you can, or already have installed for your tenant. Some of these are enabled by default and can be tenant-wide or specific environments only. I’ve not played around too much in here, other than to install Power Platform Pipelines (which are amazing btw). You can read more about other resources you can install here.
I’m not sure how new the Power Apps assets & Power Pages sites areas are; both have features marked as preview, suggesting these areas are still work in progress. Each have their own links to learn more if you want to. The Power Apps Maker Matching is actually being deprecated this year, so expect something else to appear in the Power Apps assets section at some point.
Help + support
Do you have any Power Platform issues you wish to log a support request for? This is the place to come to raise them.
In my experience, using the main Microsoft 365 portal to raise them works. But, it takes longer to get an answer. Your ticket may bounce around before landing in the right queue. In my experience, tickets get picked up faster when I’ve raise them through this part of the Power Platform Admin Centre.
You can also use this area to view other tickets (open or closed) and get information on known issues across the Power Platform & D365 landscape.
Data integration
Data integrations allow you to share data with, or retrieve data from other external systems. You can create data integration projects with these systems and will be listed here in PPAC. I believe any data flows you create will also show up in here.
There is another embedded Power BI report to show count of runs, execution state and more. There’s also an itemised bill of each project and sync; clicking on any of the entries will offer more insight, including any errors or issues. It would be great if, on the view above, there was an indicator to flag any integration projects that need some TLC.
Policies
One of my favourite places in the Power Platform Admin Centre 😂. If you’ve followed my blog in the last year, you’ll know I enjoy nerding out on Power Platform Data Loss Prevention policies. This is the first tab under Policies and is where we can see & edit our active DLP policies, and create new ones.
Power Platform DLP is a big deal for admins. It gives you tools to guide makers to use connectors (aka APIs) approved for business use. This means you can block anything you don’t want makers to use. Or, you can allow a connector for one set of makers but not others. I’ve got a few articles covering this key topic that you can find here.
Tenant Isolation is another high-level data protection principle for the Power Platform. Here you can control what other tenant(s) can connect to your tenant for Power Platform purposes (for example, within an app or a flow). This is another topic I’ve covered and is worth a further read, to ensure you’re helping to provide the necessary protection for your tenant.
Customer Lockbox is a cool feature. If Microsoft need access to your tenant to help resolve an issue, most of the time they won’t need to see your data. So, we must be mindful of any third party, even Microsoft, accessing sensitive information. With Customer Lockbox, you can set policies so any external party needs approval to access data. Any such requests will appear here. Please note this feature is only available for Managed Environments.
Enterprise policies is another feature tied to Managed Environments. This allows us to encrypt data in our environments with our own encryption keys via Azure Key Vault. The policies are created in Azure, after which they’re available here to then select and apply to chosen environment(s). This isn’t something I’ve done in anger as yet, though I’m keen to plough deeper into Microsoft’s documentation and set one up myself. Maybe a topic for a future blog 🤔.

Finally, if you currently use the Pay-as-you-go license model for the Power Platform, expect to see the related policies in the Billing policies tab. This is an easy way to keep track of this particular license method as you can’t do so anywhere else in Microsoft 365 (as far as I know).
Thanks for reading. If you liked this article and want more helpful insights into life as a Power Platform Administrator, don’t forget to follow us on socials 😊.
All articles in this focused series are in one place, here. Feel free to add it your favourites for your one-stop-shop for all your Power Platform Admin needs. Is there a topic we’ve not covered? Reach out to us and let us know!
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Great read, Craig. Looking forward to the rest in the serires
I enjoyed reading this article, thanks Craig. Waiting for the next.
Good one Criag