Forum Discussion
PowerBI Service report last date refresh wrong
Hey everyone,
I created a report in PowerBI desktop and added a last refresh date visualization, it simply uses a calculated column created in powerquery using the formula DateTime.LocalNow().
I tried the Now() function aswell same result.
Now I have a personal gateway setup which refreshes every hour. In PowerBI desktop the time is correct. If i refresh at 11:50:10 the visualisation displays the correct time. BUT in PowerBI service the time is completely different. the same visualisation gives at refresh 10:45:00 a display of 8:38:07 for example. Anyone got any idea why. I checked if the scheduled refresh time is in the same timezone this is the case (central european summer time). When I look in my PowerBI desktop table the correct data is present. I also tried exporting the data of my powerbi service report into excel then it gives the wrong data. So somehow the wrong time is input when using powerbi service. I searched for a powerbi datetime setting somewhere maybe it uses the time of some server somewhere idk but it is really odd.
Any help would be appreciated!
3 Replies
We have been experiencing a similar issue as we are GMT+8. Many of our date specific reports use DateTime.LocalNow as part of their filtering. These were reporting incorrectly until after 8am in the Service, even though they would work correctly at all times on the desktop.
From this and other testing, we found that the function always returns UTC datetime in the service. It was suggested this could be configured in the Tenancy settings but we were unable to find this.
From Microsoft's documentation:
Returns a datetime value set to the current date and time on the system.
To my mind, this is incomplete. It would be helpful if there was more explanation here. Specifically, to say that on the desktop, it returns local device time, however in the service it always returns UTC.
Oke so i noticed some odd things in PowerBI service. When scheduling a time you can pick UTC+01:00 amsterdam etc but also UTC+01:00 brussels etc. When i type in UTC+1 exact time on google it gives me 10.44 but when i check the scheduled refresh status it gives me GMT +2 central european time 11.44 which is the correct time.
I'm in the nederlands so i picked UTC+01:00 amsterdam etc.
I checked, UTC is the timezone it uses for the refreshing of data even though in scheduled refresh I have UTC+1 selected. Which also makes no sense cause amsterdam/berlin etc is UTC+2 not +1 officially, this is so confusing.
