Introduction

This post provides an overview of the Power Apps service level agreements, disaster recovery, and backup/restore capabilities.

Service Level Agreements

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Power Apps is currently set at 99.9%, which translates to an allowed monthly downtime of 43 minutes and 28 seconds. If Microsoft does not meet these Service Levels, you may be eligible for a credit towards your monthly service fees (SLA document).

Disaster recovery

In the event of an Azure region-wide outage, Microsoft provides disaster recovery for Dataverse production environments. This involves creating a replica of the Azure SQL storage and file storage in a secondary region. For example, the primary regions for Europe are North Europe (Ireland) and West Europe (Netherlands). In the event of an outage that cannot be resolved in a reasonable time frame, Microsoft will notify customers and switch traffic to the secondary environment. There may be a data loss of up to 15 minutes as a result.

Power Apps has a small Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of a few seconds or minutes, and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 to 10 hours depending on the nature of the outage.

As a customer, you do not need to take any action when setting up a Dataverse production environment. Microsoft will automatically provision a secondary environment and enable geo-redundancy for the SQL server and Azure storage. If there is expected data loss during failover, you will need to provide written approval for the failover to be executed.

Backup/restore

All environments except trial environments are automatically backed up using Azure SQL Database automated backups. You can also create manual backups on demand, such as before applying significant customizations. Backups are retained for 7 days. If you need to retain backups for longer, you can copy the environment to a dedicated sandbox instance or automate this process using PowerShell or the Azure DevOps build tools.

Copy and restore operations can take up to 8 hours, or up to 24 hours if a large amount of data including audit data needs to be copied or restored.

It’s important to consider the use of Dataverse solutions when designing Power Platform applications, as only Power Apps and Power Automate flows within solutions are included in the backup/restore operation.

In the event of data loss, it may be more efficient to restore to a temporary sandbox and manually correct/migrate the data rather than restoring the entire environment back in time. Restoring an environment is a non-reversible process that can take a significant amount of time. Using a mature application lifecycle management process allows you to revert to a previous version at any time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Power Apps has a high service level agreement and provides disaster recovery and backup/restore capabilities to ensure the availability and reliability of your applications. It is important to understand the limitations and considerations of these features in order to effectively plan for and respond to any potential outages or data loss. By utilizing a mature application lifecycle management process and considering the use of Dataverse solutions, you can further improve the resilience of your Power Platform applications.