Forum Discussion
Monitor dataset refresh
- 30 days ago
Hi sandlox
Since it's a Pro workspace, workspace monitoring is out — it requires "the workspace is assigned to a Power BI Premium or a Fabric capacity." Lakehouse/Warehouse, Semantic Link and Activator are Fabric capacity items too, so the REST API is the right route.Start here first (five minutes, no build): on each model, Settings → Refresh, keep the owner notification on and add your team to the failure-notification contacts box. Recipients must have accounts in your Entra tenant. Note that "refreshes triggered programmatically such as through Power Automate don't trigger email notifications" — worth knowing before you automate anything.
If you need history and trends:
- Register a service principal, enable Allow service principals to use Power BI APIs, and add it to the workspace as Member or Admin — the API requires it ("Caller must have Write permissions on the dataset").
- Call GET /v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/datasets/{datasetId}/refreshes?$top=60.
- Run it daily. The API keeps "between 20-60 available refresh history entries… depending on the number of refreshes in the last 3 days" — roughly a 3-day window at Pro's 8 refreshes/day. Append-only; anything you miss is gone.
- Land it somewhere Pro-friendly: a SharePoint list (free with M365, supported Power BI source) or Azure SQL.
- Report on success rate, duration, hours since last success, and consecutive failures. Add a hand-maintained expected-schedule table — it's the only way to catch a refresh that never started, which no failure alert will tell you.
One caveat on Power Automate: the Power BI connector has no refresh-history action, so you'd need HTTP with Microsoft Entra ID, a Premium connector. A scheduled PowerShell or Python script avoids that licence.
- https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-data
- https://learn.microsoft.com/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/get-refresh-history
- https://learn.microsoft.com/fabric/fundamentals/enable-workspace-monitoring
- https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/developer/embedded/embed-service-principal
Thanks,
C Srikanth
Community Support Team
Hi sandlox
We haven’t heard from you on the last response and was just checking back to see if you have a resolution yet. And, if you have any further query do let us know.
Thank you.