Alerts Work Some Days and Not Others

[bgilmore]

I have some simple alerts I am testing. I set up a "Days Left in January" metric so that each daily refresh would guarantee the alert would fire.

However, it doesn't run consistently. I linked it to a separate message via Power Automate and you can see it did not trigger on Jan 28

But in Power BI I see that the report did successfully refresh on that day:

Why didn't the alert fire? I've since added a second refresh to hopefully trigger the alert at 1pm if it doesn't fire at 9am. I intentionally set the Maximum Notification Frequency to 1 hour so that if the refresh finishes earlier than the prior day the alert should still trigger. Can someone help me with what I may be missing here?

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Just a quick question about alerts from power bi.. is this feature is now limited only to Fabric Capacity licence? as I remembered it worked for pro/Premium as well.. 

[Anonymous]

Hi @bgilmore ,

For alerts in power bi, you should know that 

Alerts only work on refreshed data. When data refreshes, Power BI looks to see if an alert is set for that data. If the data has reached an alert threshold, Power BI triggers an alert.

Receiving alerts

When the tracked data reaches one of the thresholds you've set, several things happen. First, Power BI checks to see if it's been more than an hour or more than 24 hours (depending on the option you selected) since the last alert. If the data is past the threshold, you'll get an alert.
You mentioned that you had previously set a limit of at most every 24 hours, which may be why the alert didn't take effect, and I noticed that your 1/27 refresh start time to 1/28 refresh finish time was greater than 24h.

Best regards

Albert He

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[Greg_Deckler]

@bgilmore Well, I can think of 2 possibilities. 1, your data didn't change. Not sure if that's possible but I don't know what measure you are using. 2, something was down in the Service when the refresh ran.

[bgilmore]

Thanks for the reply. My measure is a very simple datediff formula (so that I would have something guaranteed to change every day) 

Days Left in January = DATEDIFF(TODAY(),DATE(2024,01,31),DAY)

Would the Power BI alert service somehow be down while the Power BI report refreshservice is up? I figured they would be integrated. My report shows a successful refresh on 1/28, but no alert was triggered.

I am testing this alert functionality for a critical notification purpose, and I fear it is not consistent enough to be relied upon.

[Greg_Deckler]

@bgilmore Well, you probably aren't exactly wrong about that. You might try using Power Automate instead of Power BI Alerts.