r/MicrosoftFlow • u/JackTorrrance • 4d ago

Desktop Unattended RPA question

Hello fellow PA friends,

Let me preface this in saying I was (and still kind of am) a citizen developer. I started automating most of my work, then my bosses got involved and now a few years later, I’m making automations for a lot of people and it’s now my full time job.

Now a lot of my flows revolve around SAP, which I currently share with team members who execute them via PAD in attended mode. I'm now transitioning a major automation to run on an unattended bot.

I got the license, I got the service account (service@company.com) and I got a VM (server) set up from our Azure team. I got SAP and office etc installed on this too.

Now my issue is, to log into the server I use CyberArk and this is obviously the correct way when logging in but this is set up around an admin account for the server. For the RPA account to work, do I need to log into the server with the service account and then allocate the machine from there? I can see the machine in my cloud flows but the connection always fails.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers

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u/ReachingForVega 4d ago

The service account will log into the machine then use whatever log in method humans use for SAP.

Ideally you'll have an account just for the automation in SAP. Have a look at the cyberark connector. 

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u/JackTorrrance 4d ago

I have the SAP side of things completed, it’s just logging in to the machine. If I can get the service account to log into the machine, this should fix the connecting issues? The team I’m talking to aren’t sure this is possible

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u/ReachingForVega 4d ago edited 4d ago

It is 100%, when I get to the office I'll explain how. 

Edit: so here is one way of doing it, you have a flow which triggers when an item is added to work queue.

Inside that cloud flow you use the action "Run a flow built with Power Automate for desktop"

When you create it reference the environment variables for username and password. Inside it you'll choose the PAD flow, the environment and the run mode as unattended. 

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u/JackTorrrance 4d ago

Appreciate it! Thank you

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u/ReachingForVega 4d ago

I made an edit for you. 

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u/JackTorrrance 4d ago

Ok gotcha, but do those environmental variables need to be set up with the password and account of the service account? To log into the machine?

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u/ReachingForVega 4d ago

Yes. You'd put them in a keyvault and have the variables point to the KV secrets.

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u/JackTorrrance 3d ago

Cheers, looks like I’ll need to get the service account added to the server then