Regularly refreshed report that triggers alert based on change in data

[lucasiragusa]

Dear community,

I would to use Power BI to set up a report where the source data is refreshed once a week. From this report, I would like to trigger alerts (say, an email), every time there is a significant change in a certain metric when the report is updated.

Can some of you illustrate a best practice to structure this, perhaps sharing an example. My specific questions are:

• How do I set up the data structure so that the report stores the same data observed different points in time? (For example, shall I include a timestamp as a field in the report in the table where the values change, or is there another better way of doing it). What is the best data source type for my objective?

• Is there a capability that allows to trigger alerts based on a certain threshold of change from the most recent “observation” of the data compared to the previous?

• What is the way in Power BI to

Since these are a few questions at once, is there an accessible sample report that has these functionalities that I can study from?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Luca

[v-lili6-msft]

hi, @lucasiragusa

You may try to set Data alerts in Power BI service, create a measure and drag it into a card visual and set alert for it.

Reference:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-set-data-alerts

Best Regards,

Lin

[Anonymous]

Hi @Alin ,

I am trying to achieve something similar - I have created a card visual (which shows a numeric counter) from my report and pin it to a dashboard.  I then created an alert using the dashboard to be triggered whenever the numeric counter is greater than zero.

My report dataset is configured to refresh daily.  When it was refreshed the first time, my counter is 3 (for example) and the alert was triggered as expected.  When the report was refreshed the next day, my counter hasn't changed and remains to be 3.  But I noticed that this time the alert didn't get triggered.

I supposed it is because the counter value hasn't changed? However I actually want the alert to be triggered even in this case, as my requirement is to send a daily alert email to users as long as this counter is greater than zero.

Can I have a better understanding of the alert behavior? and how I can achieve the requirement mentioned above?

Thanks,

Andrew

[DKwan]

Hi Andrew, Did you end up resolving your issue? I'm in the same predicament & have not been able to find an appropriate explanation for why I'm not recieving an alert even after my dataset is refreshed. Does it not trigger if the datapoint the alert is tracking remains the same? Is there a way to recieve an alert after each data refresh, even if the datapoint didn't change? Thanks

[Thejeswar]

Hi @lucasiragusa,

For Question1,

This Question seems to be a little blanket type requirement. There are a huge number of sources supported by Power BI and each of the source will have it's own pros and cons. A Little more details on the specifics might help provide you some help

For Question 2, there is no direct facility to perform an alert to get triggered from the report when there is a certain amount of change based on thresholds.

Instead, you can add a something like a card visual that shows the amount of change in the attribute based on thresholds already set.

This can be triggered every week once when there is a dataset refresh

For Question3, 

There is something called Subscriptions in Power BI. You can ask the users to subscribe for the report of their interest.

Alternatively you can also subscribe the users who should receive a particular report in Power BI Service

The Below 2 links will provide some light on the Subscriptions

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/end-user-subscribe

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/subscribe-others-to-email-subscriptions-in-power-bi/