How to change update frequency in Power BI Service for different days of the week

[Laocsulak]

Hello,

In our company, I have configured Power BI Service with scheduled updates every 2 hours, but on the weekends we do not need to update it as frequently. Only 2 updates would be sufficient.

Since we use an AWS EC2 exclusively to run the gateway for Power BI updates, it would be advantageous to reduce the updates on weekends to have more downtime for the EC2 and spend less on that AWS service.

Although I couldn't find a way to change the update frequency for different days in Power BI Service, is there any way to do this?

[ibarrau]

Hi. You can't create two different patterns or schedules rules at PowerBi Service. However this can be made with a different approach. You could configure one thing at PowerBi (like the 2 hours with out weekends) and the second, let's say weekends, can the requested via API. You can run refreshes with PowerBi Rest API. You could configure a script at the EC2 to run only weekends.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/refresh-dataset-in-group

To make it easier you could use SimplePBI (python) or PowerBi PowerShell cmdlets.

I hope that helps,

[Laocsulak]

It's an interesting solution, but it would incur new costs to use SimplePBI and PowerBI PowerShell cmdlets and it wouldn't achieve my goal of reducing costs by turning off the EC2.

[ibarrau]

It wouldn't. If you add a script inside the EC2 you won't pay for any extra stuff. You are running the request inside something you are already paying. Extra cost would be creating a lambda script for running this.

If you want to reduce costs you can turn EC2 off and on during weekends. That's a different thing beside the refresh. The refresh will demand the EC2 to be on because of the gateway, so running on lambda ec2 or any place, you need it one to use the gateway.

I hope that helps,