Category: Flow

Within any organization who run a hybrid Office 365 setup, AAD Connect has a sync cycle of 30 minutes (default) and unless someone is on one of the sync servers or in the admin portal and spots an error, there is a possibility that Dir sync (deprecated technology but still can be used to refer to AAD Connect) could have failed and go unnoticed for some time.

In terms of generating an alert, there is more than one way to achieve this using a PowerShell job, or a task on the server using task scheduler that runs PowerShell, but for some organisations these things are not permitted or possible, so in steps Flow & Microsoft Graph.

Firstly, I'd advise popping over to the Microsoft Graph Explorer and authenticating with your admin account.

Check the box to Consent on behalf of your organization.

We are now going to access the organization resource type and look at at 2 properties, onPremisesSyncEnabled & onPremisesLastSyncDateTime.

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In part 5, we will now look to create the flow that will populate the nested folder called O365 Notices. More information on the folder structure in part 1.

We will base this post mostly around part 3 as they are very similar in what they do but with a few subtle changes and enhancements.

Please familiarise yourself with part 3 as this post will only discuss the changes required in order to achieve an hourly live update summary.

On the My Flows page, select the Flow you have created from part 3 and choose Save as, now rename the flow to O365 Notices – Daily Update (or similar).

The first modification we will make will be at the beginning to the Recurrence trigger.

We will set it to run daily and a nice enhancement is also to set a start time. You can play around with this to suit but in my environment, having an email drop through like this first thing in the morning means that the engineer who does the daily checks knows about any new notices. They can then decide whether Change Management or the Service Desk need to be made aware of anything on the back of the communication.

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In part 4, we will now look to create the flow that will populate the nested folder called Live Updates. More information on the folder structure in part 1.

We will base this post mostly around part 3 as they are very similar in what they do but with a few subtle changes and enhancements.

Please familiarise yourself with part 3 as this post will only discuss the changes required in order to achieve an hourly live update summary.

On the My Flows page, select the Flow you have created from part 3 and choose Save as, now rename the flow to Live Incidents – Hourly Update (or similar).

The first modification we will make will be at the beginning to the Recurrence trigger.

This will run hourly and it can help by reminding you of the issues that are live and may be affecting your tenant.

If you work in a 24 hour environment, then this should work well for you. but what if your company is Monday to Friday business hours, say 8am to 5pm. Do we really need a summary of live service incidents on a Saturday or Sunday or at midnight?

I would suggest not, so right after the Recurrence trigger but before we initialise variable TenantID, ClientID & SecretID we have the option to stop the flow from running if out with the time constraints. I have written a separate blog on this called So you just want Flow running in business hours - 8am to 5pm so you may want to integrate these steps for this one.

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