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Center of Excellence Starter Kit with Power Virtual Agents: Govern, Monitor and Manage

, Principal Program Manager, Power CAT, Wednesday, 7 December, 2022

As customers expand their use of Microsoft Power Platform to enable citizen developers across their organizations, they also seek capabilities to govern and monitor usage. Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s low code conversational AI solution that allows users to build sophisticated bots easily and quickly.

In its December 2022 release, the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starker Kit introduces several improvements that help organizations better govern and monitor the usage of Power Virtual Agents bots in their tenant.

 

What is the Center of Excellence Starter Kit?

The Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help organizations develop a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents.

 

What is new for Power Virtual Agents in this release?

The CoE Starter Kit in its current version already included an inventory of bots across environments. This release introduces new capabilities that allow tenant administrators to:

  • Keep track of the number of conversations per bot over time, with daily aggregates. While conversation transcripts are kept for a default duration of 30 days in Dataverse, the CoE Starter Kit generates aggregates for each bot, every day. A ‘last month’ aggregate is now also available at the bot and environment levels.
  • Allocate a number of conversations per environment, as part of the environment add-ons.
  • Receive capacity email alerts when environment add-ons get near (above 80%) or over their allocated number of conversations.
  • Get an overview dashboard of Power Virtual Agents usage in their tenant over time as well as an all-up conversation consumption versus allocation.
  • Identify bots that have been created using the new unified authoring canvas, now available in public preview.

 

Screenshot of the CoE Starter Kit Power Virtual Agents Dashboard
Screenshot of the Power Virtual Agents dashboard in the CoE Starter Kit.

In the Power Virtual Agents Dashboard, administrators can see the volume of conversations over time, per bot or per environment, and keep track of actual usage versus allocation at the environment level.

 

CoE Starker Kit - Chatbot Screenshot
Screenshot of a Power Virtual Agents bot in the CoE Starter Kit

When looking at an individual bot, an administrator can also access usage history, with a number of conversations per month.

 

CoE Starker Kit Environment Add-on Screenshot
Screenshot of an Environment Add-on record in the CoE Starter Kit

At the environment level, administrators can leverage the ‘Environment Add-on’ record to set an allocated number of conversations for it. This allocation isn’t technically enforced but is used to trigger capacity email alerts.

 

CoE Starter Kit CoE Capacity Email Alert
Screenshot of a capacity email alert notification

 

When an environment goes near or over their monthly allocated number of conversations, an email is sent to the configured administrators.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the CoE Starter Kit cover bots that are created in the Power Virtual Agents Microsoft Teams app?

No, this doesn’t cover bots created in the context of PVA for Teams (https://aka.ms/PVAforTeams). This is because these bots reside in Dataverse for Teams environments, and data in these types of environments can’t be accessed from Power Automate, which the CoE starter kit uses to gather inventory data.

 

Are conversations the same thing as billed sessions?

This extension doesn’t use the concept of ‘billed sessions’ but counts the number of conversation transcript records instead. Billed sessions are still available to customers as part of their bot analytics, in Power Virtual Agents.

 

How can I deploy the CoE Starter Kit in my tenant?

Installation instructions are available here.

 

I have setup the CoE Starter Kit but only see aggregates for the past day

By default, the CoE Starter Kit only starts creating daily aggregate records for bot conversations the day the latest version is set up. If you need to rebuild aggregates for past conversation transcript records data, you can install the CenterofExcellencePVAUsageFirstRunAllData_1_0_0_0_managed.zip solution, available here, and run its flow once.

 

How is the CoE Starter Kit supported by Microsoft?

Although the underlying features and components used to build the CoE Starter Kit (such as Microsoft Dataverse, admin APIs, and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations. If you face issues with:

  • Using the kit: report your issue here: https://aka.ms/coe-starter-kit-issues. (Microsoft Support won’t help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.)
  • The core features in Microsoft Power Platform: use your standard channel to contact Microsoft Support.