As it currently stands when I setup a dataset refresh it only emails me when it fails.

I was recently at a customer where there is a team of Power BI Developers, and I wanted to find a way that all the developers would get a copy of the dataset refresh failure email.

This would ensure a single point of failure if the person receiving the email is not in, as well as to make the entire team aware of any issues if someone in the business had a question.

Fortunately, this is relatively easy to setup and thanks to the awesome Power Platform I am going to show you, how to use Microsoft Flow to get this working.

Pre-Requisite

The only pre-requisite is that there is an existing email distribution list set up in your organisation for the people you want to notify.

This is an example of how my distribution list is below

Creating the Microsoft Flow to Distribute Emails

I will show you how using Microsoft Flow, I can then distribute the failure emails to my distribution list that I created above.

• I went into https://flow.microsoft.com
• I then clicked on My Flows on the left hand side, then at the top clicked on New and selected “Create from Blank”
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• I then clicked on Create From Blank again
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• In the search box I then searched for “When a new email arrives”
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• I then selected “When a new email arrives” for Office 365 Outlook
• If you have not connected to Office 365 Outlook, you might be prompted to connect.
  • I have already connected before so when I clicked on the Ellipses on the right hand side I could see my existing connection
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• Click on the Show Advanced options, because this is where I am going to configure which emails to send to my distribution list.
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• I then configured the sections below:
  • From: no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com
    • This is to ensure that it is emails that I receive from the Power BI Service
  • Subject Filter: Refresh failed:
    
    • This is to ensure that it will only forward on emails where the subject contains “Refresh Failed”
      
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• I then clicked on New Step
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• I then searched for “Forward an email”
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  • I selected “Forward an email” for Office 365 Outlook
• Then where it says Message ID, I clicked into the Text box, which then opened the Dynamic content.
  • I scrolled down and selected Message Id as shown below.
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• Then where it has got the To, I put in the email address of the distribution list I created earlier.
  • I also added a comment to the forwarded email as shown below.
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• I then clicked Save to say my Flow
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• On the top right-hand side, it saves it with a default name
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  • I clicked into this area and renamed the flow to: Power BI dataset refresh failure email distribution
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• And finally, on the right hand side there are options to Save, Flow Checker and Test
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• I do always recommend testing the Flow to make sure it works as expected.
  • In this situation you can possibly select to use Office 365 data, if you still have emails in your Inbox
  • 
  • I personally have found this to be really stable and have received the emails the next time it failed.

Conclusion

I have shown you how to setup and configure the Microsoft Flow to distribute dataset refresh failure emails.

Here is a link to my flow, which you can use to import into your own Microsoft Flow Environment where you will need to configure the required Outlook settings.

PowerBIDistrributionFailureEmails_FourMoo.zip

As always if you got any questions or feedback please let me know. I am most certainly not a Microsoft Flow expert, so if there is an easier way to achieve this please let me know.

Thanks for reading!!