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team_steve
Advocate I
Advocate I

When does a dashboard refresh?

Hello,

There are similar posts to this but no clear explanations or solutions that I've seen.

I'm evaluating PowerBI and have to say I'm liking what I see.

I’ve created a report contain a simple count of orders placed this week and I’ve pinned this to a dashboard. These are direct queries through the Enterprise gateway onto an on-premise SQL server. These work fine on the pc browser and on the iphone to start with.

When I enter a new order in the database and check the report it is refreshed straight away – awesome.
However the dashboard isn’t refreshed at the same time. On the dashboard I can drag the phone screen down and this perform a ‘sync’ but doesn’t update the data. I’ve added the standard ‘last refreshed’ date time to the dashboard and this shows the data is out of date. Sometimes by hours.

Occasionally the dashboard does refresh but I cannot understand why, or what has caused it.

The problem is, of course, this if the data on the dashboard and reports don’t match it’s a big problem for non-technical people, and frankly more technical, people to understand. I know I’m completely confused.


Other posts have suggested filtering issues – there are no filters here. The data is a simple SQL view containing one field, a count of orders.

I found the following page too
https://ideas.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/732231-what-if-my-data-isn-t-up-to-date

Suggestions 1 and 2 aren’t relevant for my setup. Suggestion 3 doesn’t appear to be true, my tiles can be a lot more than 10 minutes out of date.


Can anyone explain what controls the dashboard refresh time/rate? Or where I might be going wrong.

 

Thanks for looking
Steve

2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS
RomiK
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

Hi All,


Following your feedback on the Power BI community, we have improved the dashboard refresh functionality. You can now manually initiate a refresh to your tiles by opening the dashboard in the Power BI Mobile app for iOS and pulling down the top of the screen (see the animated image below).
When performing a manual refresh, we also trigger a tile refresh. Tile refreshes update the dashboard view, and retrieve the latest data in the underlying model. This means that you can be sure that your device’s screen is displaying the most recent tile data.
Please note that dashboards are updated automatically per dashboard owner configuration. Dashboards that are based on Direct Query connections have an automatic update about every fifteen minutes, so triggering a manual refresh will result in getting the latest data from the connected model.

 

see Video in the release blog:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-mobile-apps-feature-summary-august-2016/

View solution in original post

Hello again,

As the person who originally raised this discussion I thought I should return and report my findings.
From my testing I confirm that dashboards and reports collecting data via direct query are working great. The dashboards are syncing to the live, on premise data, when you 'pull down' the screen on the iPhone.

Thanks to all who commented to confirm I wasn't going crazy and those who fixed/improved the Power BI product.

View solution in original post

31 REPLIES 31
Anonymous
Not applicable

I have created 2 months ago a dashboard for my team, I have turned on the automatic refresh, seems to be turning off automatically. to add there is always error in the refresh of the data.

 

What should I do to avoid such thing?

gauravbi
Regular Visitor

This chrome extension did trick for us.

https://spgaurav.blogspot.com/2019/04/chrome-plugin-to-auto-refresh-power-bi.html

Note : This wont work with full sceen

RomiK
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

Hi All,


Following your feedback on the Power BI community, we have improved the dashboard refresh functionality. You can now manually initiate a refresh to your tiles by opening the dashboard in the Power BI Mobile app for iOS and pulling down the top of the screen (see the animated image below).
When performing a manual refresh, we also trigger a tile refresh. Tile refreshes update the dashboard view, and retrieve the latest data in the underlying model. This means that you can be sure that your device’s screen is displaying the most recent tile data.
Please note that dashboards are updated automatically per dashboard owner configuration. Dashboards that are based on Direct Query connections have an automatic update about every fifteen minutes, so triggering a manual refresh will result in getting the latest data from the connected model.

 

see Video in the release blog:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-mobile-apps-feature-summary-august-2016/

Hello again,

As the person who originally raised this discussion I thought I should return and report my findings.
From my testing I confirm that dashboards and reports collecting data via direct query are working great. The dashboards are syncing to the live, on premise data, when you 'pull down' the screen on the iPhone.

Thanks to all who commented to confirm I wasn't going crazy and those who fixed/improved the Power BI product.

yaronc
Power BI Team
Power BI Team

Hi @team_steve,

Dashboard tiles that are based on direct query should be refreshed automatically every 15 minutes (or more if it was explicitly defined by the data-set owner when the connection was created). On the web, user can click on the elipsis and then manually refresh the tiles to save the 15 minutes waiting.

Recently we had high severity issue with tiles freshness but this was resolved already.

Can you please tell if you still don’t see up to date dashboard tiles 15 minutes or so after that the data was updated in the DB? Please check it both on the web and on the mobile (separately) if you can.

If you dont see up to date data please update the thread here and also open support ticket as this is not the expected

behavior (support.powerbi.com) .

 

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hello @yaronc , you wrote that "On the web, user can click on the elipsis and then manually refresh the tiles to save the 15 minutes waiting." I can not find any elipsis or something where i can manually refresh the tiles..also are you talking about a dashboard or a report? Can you please help me? 🙂

Thanks

Hi yaronc,

Thanks for your reply. I understand what you are saying about a 15 minute refresh but I thought that with a Direct Query the data connection is refreshed on demand. Therefore the dataset owner (me) has no control over the refresh timing.
My dashboard tiles when accessed from my iPhone are not updated every 15 minutes.
When I make a change to the data source (an on-premise SQL database), the mobile report updates within a minute or so, but the dashboard can take a couple of hours.
I slide down the mobile screen to refresh the data, it says it is synching, then that it is up to date. But it's not!
If I use the 'Refresh Dashboard Tiles' option from the Power BI Web App on the laptop everything works fine and the data is refresh immedietly.  - Doing this also seems to force the mobile dashboard to update.
I'm really confused about how and when mobile dashboard tiles should update. Do you have any info?

Hi @team_steve

We are planning to add the manual refresh for direct query based dashboards on mobile apps so you will have the capability to manually refresh the Direct Query based dashboard. We are also fixing bugs related to auto refresh time (Bugs fixes should be in Production in 3 weeks from now).

I will update you when we can commit on ETA for the Direct Query manual refresh.

Thanks,

Yaron

Hi @yaronc,

 

As these days we experiencing issues with the auto refresh (both mobile and service), could you please pass some information if the bugs you mentioned are fixed in the Production?

 

Thanks

Tsanka

 

hi @Tsanka,

Recently we fixed some issues related to refresh of dashboards connected directly (or through gateway) to data.

These kind of dashboards should be updated automatically every 15 minutes (or as the user configured when connected to the data).

Can you please test it once again (on the web first and later on mobile) and tell if the data is not updated in the expected timeframe?

 

In addition we are looking on adding to the mobile apps the option to do manual refresh of these dashboards to bring the latest data.

We cannot commit on this capability yet but if we not tackle problems it will be delivered very soon.

 

Hope to hear that it works now better for you.

 

Thanks,

Yaron

Hi @yaronc,

 

Thanks so much for replying.

 

My (and our clients') observations are that things are not okay with the refresh of a dashboard in a browser, when having a live connection to a on-premise SSAS tabular. Since Jul 17-18th the dashboards are not automaticaly refreshed at all (i.e. when you are using browser, not app). The only way to refresh them is to do it manually. May be there was a new release of the service put into the production last weekend that introduced this bug.

 

 

Kind regards

Tsanka

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi @Tsanka,

 

Can you please share the dashboard url so we can investigate the issue that you experience?

 

Thanks,

Yaron

Hi

 

I would appreciate your feedback on the following issue.

 

I've created a dashboard on Power BI desktop that has been uploaded to my Power BI Cloud(I have the Pro account).

 

I've used direct query when importing tables from an local SQL-server and would like to display the dashboard on a monitor.

But I'm facing some issues with the dashboard refresh, updates in the databases are not being shown in the dashboards.

 

Even though were using Direct Qurey mode and an On Premises Gateway, the dashboard content are not being updated.

Would like a solution with automated refresh (without manual intervention).

 

Any suggestions?


Thanks

Hi @Samaneh78,

 

Can you please tell what device you are using? 

Just to make sure, you are using dashboards and not reports, is that correct?

 

please check the refresh frequency in the data-set settings as shown here - 

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-data/#live-connections-and-directq...

 

 

If it doesn't refresh on time as expected please tell if it happens on certain devices or on all devices and apps and if it takes more time than the expected or just never refreshes automatically.

 

Thanks,

Yaron

Update:

 

From yesterday morning the automatic refresh of dashboards connected directly to an on-premise SSAS is working just fine - both in the web and in the app (tested on an iOS app).

 

@yaronc, thank you so much for your help and your quick response!

 

Best regards

Tsanka

 

Hello Team,

 

in our enterprise we experience the same exact problem for about a week.

can you please share the solution that was applied here?

 

with Best regards, 

Misha

We are actively investigating the issue that you experience.

Until we fix this issue, as a workaround you can do "Refresh Now" on the on-prem data-set (from within PowerBI) and that should trigger a refresh and also reset the dashboards state so that they resume refreshing automatically. 

 

Thanks,

Yaron

I've experienced the same issues that other users have flagged above (intermittent refreshing, then no refreshing at all since the 17th until the latest fix.

 

Now, since the fixes, refreshes are once again intermittent (both on iOS and in PowerBI), but now when i do manually refresh in Power BI, it'll refresh data every minute or so for about 5 minutes, then revert back to intermittent.

 

Anybody else experiencing this?

 

Thanks 

I've just installed the update to the Gateway and things seem to be running a lot better from the iPhone.

Dashboards are updating on demand (well, no more than a couple of minutes delay)

Reports are updating fine

The data between the dashboard and the first page of a report are in sync.

 

However, I have a report with 2 pages and one of the dashboard tiles is pinned from a visualisation on the 2nd page. The 2nd page of the report is up to date but the dashboard tile isn't updating.

 

Does anyone else see this? I would be good to know if this is a bug, or something odd with my setup.

I guess I can write reports containing only one page to try and workaround.

 

In summary, a massive step forward and small step back!

Anonymous
Not applicable

I thought I'd jump into this thread with a description of what we're seeing when attempting to refresh dashboards on mobile. I've got 2 datasets using DirectQuery, one connects to an on premise SSAS Tabular 2014 Enterprise model and the second connects to a view on an on premise SQL Server 2014 Enterprise database.

 

The mobile app rarely shows updated data, the tabular model holds data at the date/day level and when syncing won't show the previous day's data. I need to logon to the web service and do a manual refresh, even the web service dashboards are not up to date. However the underlying reports are up to date. I've tried the new On Premise Data Gateway but it's the same issue.  The last refresh stamp on the tiles is also out of date.

 

I've been in contact with MS support on this and was told that mobile dashboards are not updated automatically by design, but I can't believe that's the case at it currently makes the mobile app pointless.

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