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garythomannCoGC's avatar
garythomannCoGC
Impactful Individual
4 months ago

Notify on semantic model refresh completed with warnings (including DAX) not just Power Query errors

Summary Need proactive way to notify when DAX warning occur within semantic models   Details Currently one does not know of DAX errors until either seen in pbi desktop column warning icon  OR Re...
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Nasif_Azam's avatar
Nasif_Azam
Super User
4 months ago

Hi garythomannCoGC,

You have hit a real and officially documented gap not user error. 

 

Per Microsoft Learn (Data refresh in Power BI):

"If you use the Power BI REST APIs to perform refreshes, warnings are logged in the refresh history, but the Datasets - Get Refresh History and Get Refresh Execution Details REST APIs do not include warnings in their responses."

That's why the built-in refresh failure notification and any Power Automate flow built on those APIs will silently miss Completed with warnings including DAX-origin ones (broken measure refs, unknown functions, type mismatches).

 

Three workarounds that actually catch DAX warnings:

  1. XMLA-endpoint refresh (via Tabular Editor, SSMS, or PowerShell Invoke-ProcessASDatabase): Warnings come back directly in the XMLA response. Wrap in a script and post to Teams/email on any non-empty warning collection.
  2. Fabric Notebook + semantic-link (sempy): Start a trace on ProgressReportEnd / JobGraph events around fabric.refresh_dataset(); trace captures warning messages the REST API drops. Phil Seamark has a great write-up on dax.tips.
  3. Shift-left / proactive: Run Best Practice Analyzer (Tabular Editor) in your CI/CD on the .bim/TMDL before publish, and use INFO.VIEW.MEASURES() DMVs to flag broken DAX early.

 

Several tenants (incl. MS Q&A threads) are reporting a wave of false "missing table" warnings starting 26 March 2026 on untouched models worth ruling out before chasing a model fix. Longer term, please upvote / file this at https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com a first-class "notify on warning" toggle alongside the failure toggle is the real fix.

 

Best Regards,
Nasif Azam