When working with Power BI, it is common to schedule data refreshes regularly within Power BI Service. And, as a report/data owner you may want to be notified when this is complete. Unfortunately with current scheduled refresh settings in Power BI, alerts are only sent on failures as shown in the picture below.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to be notified when the refresh was successful? Furthermore – what if upon a successful refresh you could initiate other actions, such as notify your team or something else?
While I’ve seen some workarounds out there – there is a simple solution if you are using a dataflow.
Dataflows and Power Automate
In Power Automate – there is no current trigger in the Power BI connector to trigger flows on a refresh. However – there is one for dataflows as shown in the image:
This trigger executes a flow when a dataflow refresh is complete – regardless if that refresh is successful or not. This allows you to add actions. Let’s look at what data values become present:
This provides information on the refresh including:
- Whether the refresh successful or not (Refresh Status)?
- When the refresh started and ended, which also allows you to create metrics on how long refreshing takes
With the Refresh Status output, we can now add actions for both successful and failed refreshes. One easy use case is simply adding an email notification to indicate the status.
However, you can also have different actions depending on a successful (or not) refresh.
And that’s all there is to creating a simple notification for dataflow refreshes – both successful as well as failed.