When does a dashboard refresh?

[team_steve]

Hello,

There are similar posts to this but no clear explanations or solutions that I've seen.

I'm evaluating PowerBI and have to say I'm liking what I see.

I’ve created a report contain a simple count of orders placed this week and I’ve pinned this to a dashboard. These are direct queries through the Enterprise gateway onto an on-premise SQL server. These work fine on the pc browser and on the iphone to start with.

When I enter a new order in the database and check the report it is refreshed straight away – awesome.
However the dashboard isn’t refreshed at the same time. On the dashboard I can drag the phone screen down and this perform a ‘sync’ but doesn’t update the data. I’ve added the standard ‘last refreshed’ date time to the dashboard and this shows the data is out of date. Sometimes by hours.

Occasionally the dashboard does refresh but I cannot understand why, or what has caused it.

The problem is, of course, this if the data on the dashboard and reports don’t match it’s a big problem for non-technical people, and frankly more technical, people to understand. I know I’m completely confused.

Other posts have suggested filtering issues – there are no filters here. The data is a simple SQL view containing one field, a count of orders.

I found the following page too
https://ideas.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/732231-what-if-my-data-isn-t-up-to-date

Suggestions 1 and 2 aren’t relevant for my setup. Suggestion 3 doesn’t appear to be true, my tiles can be a lot more than 10 minutes out of date.

Can anyone explain what controls the dashboard refresh time/rate? Or where I might be going wrong.

Thanks for looking
Steve

[RomiK · Accepted solution]

Hi All,

Following your feedback on the Power BI community, we have improved the dashboard refresh functionality. You can now manually initiate a refresh to your tiles by opening the dashboard in the Power BI Mobile app for iOS and pulling down the top of the screen (see the animated image below).
When performing a manual refresh, we also trigger a tile refresh. Tile refreshes update the dashboard view, and retrieve the latest data in the underlying model. This means that you can be sure that your device’s screen is displaying the most recent tile data.
Please note that dashboards are updated automatically per dashboard owner configuration. Dashboards that are based on Direct Query connections have an automatic update about every fifteen minutes, so triggering a manual refresh will result in getting the latest data from the connected model.

see Video in the release blog:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-mobile-apps-feature-summary-august-2016/

[yaronc]

Hi @misham_gvcplc,

If this issue still appears on your dashboards can you please send me a private message with your dashboard urls?

In any case on Monday the service team is planning to continue the investigation for all tenants and fix any issues they discover.

Thanks,

Yaron

[ByblosBI]

Hello,
We have the same issue, refreshes don't work automatically for dashboards. Sometimes underlying reports also don't show latest data available in the on-premise SSAS. 

I have created two same reports and dashboards, one published to MyWorkspace, the other one published to a Group. Although they query the exact same data, they are showing different data (one is a day behind the other), but non of them is showing the latest data.

Please let me know when you have a fix in place for this.

Kind regards

[Tsanka]

Hi @misham_gvcplc,

Have you checked the situation this weekend?

We have several customers in Bulgaria and last week we had the same problem in all of them. Fortunately the issue was fixed this Saturday morning, at least for the tenants (companies) that I am monitoring. The fix is obviously in the service - dashboards in the web started to be automatically refreshed, then I checked the App - and there the refresh was happening as well (and more frequently than on every 2nd hour)

Hope the issue is fixed for your tenants as well.

Best regards

Tsanka

[Tsanka]

Thanks, @yaronc,

I have sent you the URLs in a private message.

Kind regards

Tsanka

[team_steve]

Hi Yaronc,

    I have a similar setup as Tsanka. On-premise SQL, queried with a direct query. My dashboards haven't refreshed on mobile for about 36 hours.

I see 3 problems with direct query/mobile reporting.
1. You cannot refresh the data on demand from mobile.

2. When data is refreshed, different dashboards refresh at different times. Leading inconsistance charts/graphs etc

3. When data is refreshed. Dashboards and reports refresh at different time. Again, leading to inconsistances.

Regards
Steve

[team_steve]

Thanks for the reply Yaron, I guess I misunderstood exactly what Direct Query was supposed to do.

Some clarification of how the auto refresh is supposed to work at present would be very welcome. Especially if there is a way for me to control it.

If a manual refresh of data from the phone can be made available this would be AWESOME!

Thanks again

[JRastenberger]

We have made a solution that uses the free account type. The dashboard is updated daily via manual publish from Power BI Desktop. The webpage updates with the new data, but the iOS app does not. It requires the person to logout and then login again to update. Very annoying. Using the latest version of iOS app. Please note that it is the Reports the user looks at. Even when changing the layout a bit the report shows with the changed view, but data is still old. Must be some error in data updates in the app. I am using the latest iOS version updated 27th of april (same error in previous versions). Makes the dashboards quite useless. iOS is 9.3.1 (32 bit)

[coenfiona]

Hi,

My customers are having the same issue - they have to log out to refresh. Did you ever find a solution?

Kind Regards,
Fiona

[DLH]

I am experiencing the same issue - our mobile reporting dashboard data is not refreshing on our iphones.

However, if I use the same URL to connect to the dashboards, then the data is refreshed-

Not sure if this is the correct forum since we are using the "SQL Server Reporting Services" section of the Power BI Mobile application?

[team_steve]

This is not the same issue.
I'm using Direct Query to attemt to pull data from the on premise data source. You are doing a manual publish from the Power BI Desktop.

[team_steve]

Bump - surely someone understands what controls this? Or at least suffers the same issue. This is a block to us using and promoting Power BI to others. Please help if you can.