How to Run Desktop Flows from Power Automate Cloud?

In this post, we will run our Power Automate Desktop (PAD) flows from the Power Automate Cloud. You must have installed the PAD on your system and started creating the flows. Now you need to run the flows remotely. You are at the right place. Follow along and start triggering your flows from the cloud.

Prerequisites

1. On-Premises Data Gateway: The gateway is an enterprise-grade secure connection between Power Automate and your device (where your desktop flows run). Power Automate uses the gateway to access your on-premises device so that it can trigger your desktop flows from an event, schedule, or button.
2. Work or School account to login to both PAD and Power Automate cloud.
3. Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2019

Note: If your device runs Windows 10 Home, you can use PAD to create your desktop flows and monitor them on Power Automate Cloud. You can’t trigger desktop flows to run from the cloud on Windows 10 Home devices.

Video

Watch the below video. This video covers everything starting from creating a desktop flow (Automating Web), installing the gateway, and triggering from the cloud. In this post, we will only cover the trigger from the cloud part.

Trigger Desktop Flows from the Cloud

Login to flow.microsoft.com using the same account you used to log in to PAD and gateway. Click on My Flows -> Desktop Flows. Here you will see all your desktop flows built with PAD.

Let us suppose, I want to trigger GetTemperatureOfMumbaiCity. Go to New Flow -> Instant Cloud Flow.

Give a name of your cloud flow and select the Manually trigger a flow.

Click on New Step and select desktop flows.

Choose the action Run a flow built with Power Automate Desktop.

Here we create a new connection. Select the Gateway name from the dropdown. If you don’t see your gateway, it means that gateway is not installed properly or you used different credentials to log in to gateway.

The domain and username & password are your windows credentials. Open the command prompt and just type whoami to get the domain and username. Enter the password for this domain and username.

Basically, these are your windows credentials which you use to log in to your computer. If the connection is successful, you will see the below action where you select your desktop flow and run mode.

Many users face timeout errors or check if PAD is installed or could not connect to the gateway errors. Some resolutions to fix them –

1. Make sure you are not using Windows 10 Home edition.
2. PAD is installed and logged in
3. Gateway is up and running
4. Use same credential for PAD, Gateway and Cloud
5. Check your windows credentials
6. Open Gateway and login again, keep the gateway window open till you try creating the connection again.

The 6th fix worked for me.

Select the desktop flow from the dropdown. Choose run mode as Attended (make sure you are logged in to your machine). If you are running unattended, make sure all the users are logged out from your windows machine.

Below is what the complete flow looks like.

Save the flow and test it manually.

Finally, run the flow.

You can check the run history and see if any error occurred.

Thank you All!!! Hope you find this useful.

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