Did you know you could use the Scheduled Cache refresh to notify you if your Live Connection is down between Power BI and your SSAS/AAS Database?

In this example below I already have got my reporting connecting to an Azure Analysis Services database, this could also be an On-Premise SQL Server Analysis Services database.

  • I make sure that I first have got a dashboard created.
    • If the dashboard is not created with some tiles, it will not update the cache for the dashboard.
  • I go into the dataset settings where my report is.
  • I then expand the option under Schedule Cache refresh
  • I then can configure the frequency that I want the cache to refresh. This in turn will connect to my AAS/SSAS source.
    • NOTE: If you have a lot of dashboard tiles or dashboards, this could potentially increase the usage of your AAS/SSAS source. I would recommend testing this to make sure that the impact will be minimal.
  • If the cache cannot refresh, meaning that it cannot connect to the AAS/SSAS source, this means that my connection is down, or there is something wrong with the database.
  • I could then also configure the failure emails to go out to other users or groups within my organization.

I hope that this has helped to show an alternative way to check to make sure that Live Connections are working.

Any comments or suggestions are most welcome.