Random Refresh Fail

Hey ArchStanton  , 

Your refresh failures in Microsoft Power BI are happening because your login token occasionally expires. Power BI uses secure authentication tokens to connect to data sources, and due to security policies in Microsoft Entra ID, these tokens sometimes require re-authentication. When that happens, the scheduled refresh fails until you click “Edit credentials” and sign in again. This is normal security behavior, not a report or data issue.

The real concern is that the refresh is tied to your personal account. If it expires while you're away, no one else can fix it, which creates unnecessary risk for the organisation.

Best Practice: Instead of using a personal account, create a Service Principal (app registration) and use it to authenticate all your data sources. Configure your dataset connections through this Service Principal so authentication is centrally managed and not dependent on an individual user account. This will prevent these recurring refresh failures in the future.

If this solved your issue, please mark it as the solution so others can find it easily.

If it helped, a quick ‌‌ Kudos is always appreciated it helps highlight useful answers for the community.

Thanks for being part of the discussion !!!

Yes, you will continue to own and publish the report just as you do now. The only change is that for data source authentication, you will use the Service Principal credentials (username and password), which will be provided to you by your IT team.


Mark as Solution if this is usefull.