Alerts are only sent if your data changes ??

[curiouspbix0]

Alerts are only sent if your data changes.

After setting an alert for every hour, email notifications are being sent regardless of the threshold changes.

Data refresh is every 50 minutes.

Threshold = 0

Current Value = 3

Email sent at hour 1.

Data set refreshes.

Theshold =0 

Current Value = 3

Now another email is sent when there is no change in current value, is this normal behaviour ?

Is there a way to only send the second email if the Current value changes ?

Max notification frequency is set to hourly. 

[axkuu]

I wouldn't be so sure that this is by design

From the https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-set-data-alerts
Considerations and troubleshooting

• Alerts aren't supported for card tiles with date or time measures.
• Alerts only work with numeric data types.
• Alerts only work on refreshed data. They don't work on static data.
• Because alerts are only sent if your data changes, you don't receive duplicate alerts for an unchanged value.
• Alerts only work on streaming datasets if you build a KPI, card, or gauge report visual and then pin that visual to the dashboard.
• You can create up to 250 alerts across all your models.

[Marlow]

We now have the inverse of this issue - Alert Notifications are not being sent even though the number of records is greater than the alert tolerance. Because the records have not changed since last the last refresh. 

More details; 

• we generate approx 500 Data Quality reports per week. Approx 60% of our reports have no records on any given week. So we have set our alert tolerance to greater than 0, as only the reports with records  need to sent. 

• Issue is now reports with records (i.e. greater than 0) are not being sent if the records have not changed from the previous week. We still need these reports to be sent - as these issues need to be addressed.

Question - any guidance on how we can set Power BI to send a notification is there are records in a report, even if this is the same number of records as the week prior?

Thank you. 

[nickyvv · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately this is by design 🙂
Whenever the data is refreshed, a check is performed if a data alert is met.

As the docs mention:
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.