On Premises Data Gateway/Dataset - Email notification when failure improvment

[MichaelP]

I have just experienced a bad weekend return. All users complaining that their reports/dashboards were not operating anymore.

I quickly discovered that both On Premises Gateways (DEV and PROD)  were "down", "Unable to connect: The gateway is either offline or could not be reached".

Microsoft support did not provide a reason, but instead suggested frequent update of the OPG, as well restart of the associated Services on the machines when something is going wrong.

I asked why should we wait for end users to complain, prior taking action, as PowerBI service knows there are some refresh issues, as this is shown to me immediately on the Manage Gateways portal?

I was suggested to raise idea... Great so here I am.

So for Microsoft sake and I believe every IT organization that wants to keep trust from end users, we need:

-Capability to set alerts on any dataset refresh failure. I say ANY because I discovered few hours after the start of my investigations that I got some Failure to refresh notifications in my Outlook Clutter folder..... Clutter: not good. I need to fix that. But I also realized that only few datasets were sending such. Investigating a bit more, it seems my datasets "Live Connected", "Direct Query" not needed a refresh setup per se, won't allow to setup such alert. On the opposite, Excel based, Folder based dataset are allowing me to setup the "Send refresh failure notification email to me".

-Capability to add multiple recipients for that notifications, including Active Directory distribution groups to ensure such issues are addressed asap.

[v-haibl-msft]

@MichaelP

For feature/improvement requests, please create idea in https://ideas.powerbi.com but not in Issues forum. I noticed that you've already created one here.

Best Regards,
Herbert

[MichaelP]

Boundary between ideas and issues is thin. I am in IT. Not being able to detect  and fix outage prior end user detect it, for me is an issue.

And today I have no mean (automated) to warn us (IT) that a Gateway is not able to do what it is supposed to do, even if the Service is still up and running on the host machine.

Now I have provided ideas to you to solve that issue, and yes I have postedan idea in the same time, to maximize the change to get read and understood. Some Ideas would take years to be picked and implemented, reason why to me this is an issue.

If you have an immediate  solution to solve that issue I am listening.

Is PowerBI not supposed to provide data analytics available anywhere anytime? Our executives, our procurements, sales, support department would not care much of whether you say it shall be an idea. For them they just lost the capability to consume their data, and they are considering this as an issue.

Best regards.