Power Automate - don't trust the green tick too much

There isn't actually any HTML tag in the text you pasted. The issue is most likely caused by special characters or formatting that Microsoft Tech Community's editor is interpreting incorrectly.

The most suspicious part is:

Request submitted -> SharePoint item created -> Approval sent -> Status updated -> Notification sent.

If you're copying this from another editor, hidden formatting characters can sometimes get carried over.

Also, Markdown formatting such as:

• Succeeded
• What happened?
• Input validation

may not always paste cleanly depending on where you're posting it.

For Microsoft Tech Community, I'd use a plain-text version with simple formatting:

A green tick in Power Automate doesn't always mean the process succeeded.

This is something I understood better after working with business-critical flows.

Imagine a flow like this:

Request submitted → SharePoint item created → Approval sent → Status updated → Notification sent.

The flow run shows "Succeeded".

Looks good.

But what if the notification didn't reach the user?

Or the approval is still pending after three days?

Or the flow was triggered twice and created duplicate records?

Or the process stopped after updating the status but before completing the next business step?

From Power Automate's point of view, individual actions may have completed successfully.

But from the business user's point of view, the process may still be stuck.

That's where I think automation design becomes more important than simply knowing which connector or action to use.

For important processes, I usually think about:

• Input validation
  • Duplicate handling
  • Timeout scenarios
  • Error handling
  • Retry
  • Logging
  • Notifications
  • Recovery
  • Monitoring

Especially with flows running hundreds or thousands of transactions, you can't depend on someone opening the run history every time something goes wrong.

The flow should give you enough information to answer:

What happened?

Where did it fail?

Which transaction was affected?

Can we safely run it again?

For me, that's the difference between a flow that simply works and an automation that can actually be supported in production.

What is one Power Automate issue you've faced where the run showed "Succeeded", but the business process wasn't actually completed?