You know the story, sometimes other things are more important and you forget to clean up. What happen is, after a while you get an email from Microsoft. Right, this email reminds you about the automated cleanup of my inactive Power Platform environments. This is good, because it helps to reduce unneeded resources.

I got this email from one of my Demo Environments:

In detail, I use this Dataverse Environment to simulate Application Lifecycle Management for Power Platform. In this particular case I don’t trigger a deployment to my PROD environment very often, but it takes me several manual steps to configure everything. In other words, I don’t want to lose this Dataverse environment.

Trigger Environment Activity

What can I do? Correct, I must trigger an activity (see also Microsoft Docs: Trigger Environment Activity). For this, I navigate in my Dataverse Admin Center to my environments. Here I search for the one, where an action is required and click on Detailed view:

My simulated PROD environment show me a correct warning:

Right, I have used a Developer environment in order to simulate my PROD stage for Application Lifecycle Management. Furthermore, I haven’t used this environment and the containing apps for more than 91 days.

Next, I press Trigger environment activity and another dialog opens:

I click on Continue. As you see, my environment activity is now triggered successfully:

Perfect, I have now protected my environment from automatic cleanup.

Summary

Let me wrap up. You have seen, I was notified by Microsoft because I did not use my Power Platform developer environment. Yes, the same story happens with my unused Dataverse for Teams environments.

However, don’t panic! I can prevent my environment from being cleaned up. For this I must trigger an activity in my Dataverse environment. I can do this by running a Power Automate flow or using a Power App or I can trigger an activity for my environment in the Platform Admin portal.

I showed you how I suspended the cleanup process directly from my Power Platform Admin portal. For this I selected the respective environment and triggered the environment activity. Now I have 90 additional days until the next notification appears.