Power Platform Monitoring, Admin Controls, and Agent Governance Guide

Monitoring activity across Power Platform environments isn’t a nice to have – it's a requirement. As usage scales and Copilot agents multiply, visibility becomes essential for protecting data, optimizing costs, and ensuring the platform is delivering value.

But monitoring is only part of the picture. Effective governance also depends on having the right admin controls in place and knowing when (and when not) to build with agents. Let’s uncover how to develop a more mature strategy around Power Platform monitoring and agent governance, from insights and inventory to lifecycle management and decision frameworks. 

Why Monitoring Power Platform Activity Matters

Power Platform is a flexible, user-driven ecosystem – but without active monitoring, that flexibility can lead to hidden risks. From orphaned projects and over-provisioned environments to agent sprawl and capacity creep, what starts as innovation can quickly become unmanageable without visibility.

Here are a few things organizations should be paying attention to:

• Solutions with ownership issues
• Popular solutions running in the Default environment
• Non-production environments being used as de facto production
• Capacity usage across environments and workloads
• New agents, including connectors and publishing locations 

These insights are essential to understanding where risk lives, how to prioritize governance efforts, and where to intervene before issues escalate. 

What You Gain from Monitoring and Insights

Monitoring Power Platform use at scale allows organizations to: 

• Mitigate Risk: Identify shadow IT, agent sprawl, and unapproved integrations before they lead to exposure.
• Assess Criticality: Understand who is building what, and which solutions support high-impact business processes.  
• Ensure Business Continuity: Pinpoint dependencies that could disrupt operations and ensure critical systems have backup and recovery plans in place.
• Optimize Costs: Monitor usage, licensing, and storage to reclaim unused resources and avoid overpaying for low-value automation. 

Without visibility, teams are left guessing which apps, flows and agents matter, which ones pose risk, and which are simply costing money without delivering results.

Why Power Platform Monitoring is Still a Challenge

Many organizations rely on the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) and the Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit to manage governance. While PPAC provides tenant-wide visibility and admin controls, it often lacks the business context needed to take meaningful action. It can also be difficult to locate and consolidate information across environments.  

The CoE Starter Kit adds valuable inventory and maker insights, but it's not always easy to operationalize at scale - especially in larger or more complex environments.  

Without a centralized view that ties together technical properties, business context, and actionable insights, it becomes difficult to prioritize efforts or enforce policies consistently across the platform. 

What a Good Power Platform Monitoring Strategy Looks Like

A mature monitoring strategy makes insights actionable. That means:  

• Performing regular inventory across all environments
• Collecting both technical and business context (ownership, purpose, sensitivity, department)
• Making data available through a single, security-trimmed view
• Reducing context switching by allowing admins to take action in place 

Insights should lead to decisions. Whether it’s flagging a high-risk agent for review or reclaiming unused capacity, governance improves when it’s based on real activity and context, not guesswork. 

Admin Controls You Should Be Using

Monitoring is only one side of the coin. Admin controls are what enable action. With Copilot Studio gaining momentum, new governance options are becoming available in the PPAC. 

Key controls to prioritize:

Copilot Studio Author Restrictions

Limit who can create agents by assigning permissions through security groups. This helps reduce agent sprawl and allows you to pair creation rights with internal training or enablement requirements. 

Tenant Isolation Limitations

Traditional Power Platform tenant isolation (inbound/outbound blocking) does not currently apply to Copilot Studio. Do not rely on it to prevent agent-based data exfiltration across tenants. New models of isolation will likely be needed. 

Web Channel Restrictions

If agents are published to public web channels via Direct Line, admins can configure policies to block certain websites from being used as knowledge sources. This helps reduce the chance of agents responding based on unvetted or untrusted content.

These controls form the foundation of agent-level governance – but they work best when implemented alongside usage insights and ownership policies.

 When to Build an Agent: A Framework for Decision-Making

With Copilot Studio in the spotlight, there’s a temptation to solve every problem with an agent. But agents aren’t the answer to everything, and without a consistent evaluation framework, they can be misapplied or overbuilt. 

A strong agent framework considers: 

• Technical Fit: Is the use case a good match for agent functionality? Agents work best when tasks require AI reasoning or autonomous execution.
• User Experience: Will the user benefit from a conversational, natural language interface? If not, a simpler automation might be a better fit.  
• Cost and ROI: Does the agent provide enough business value to justify the build, maintenance, and licensing costs?  
• Governance and Compliance: Can you track usage, audit decisions, and apply policy controls as required by your internal standards or external regulations? 

In some cases, a Power Automate flow or traditional app may be more appropriate. It’s important to truly evaluate your use case to help teams choose the right solution for the job, rather than defaulting to agents every time. 

Gain Confidence Around Your Agent Governance

Power Platform continues to evolve, and Copilot Studio is accelerating that shift. But growth without governance is unsustainable. Monitoring and admin controls are essential to maintaining trust, controlling cost, and empowering your teams to build safely. 

The AvePoint Confidence Platform gives you the tools to govern agents and Power Platform environments with the visibility, automation, and policy enforcement you need to stay in control. 

With AvePoint, you can: 

• Monitor agent prompts, actions, and outcomes across Microsoft 365 and Copilot
• Manage the full agent lifecycle – from creation to renewal and retirement
• Automate workspace governance and enable users to manage their own data securely
• Measure adoption with insights into task completion, usage trends, and sentiment 

Governance shouldn’t be an afterthought. It’s how you protect information and unlock its full potential.