It is good practice to check your datasets periodically for refresh errors. A quick way is to view the list of datasets in a workspace, but if you are the admin of many workspaces, checking each workspace individually can get tedious. Refresh notification emails provide a convenient alternative. Just leave the checkbox Send refresh failure notification emails to me enabled in your refresh configuration and verify that spam filters don’t block the messages from Microsoft Power BI. The following screenshot depicts the refresh configuration for a dataset and a sample notification message.
In the above configuration settings, did you notice the textbox Email these users when the refresh fails? This is a new capability released this week!
By using the Email these users when the refresh fails textbox, you can now specify additional users and email-enabled groups. The specified recipients receive refresh failure notifications in addition to the dataset owner. This might be a colleague taking care of your datasets while you are on vacation. It could also be the email alias of your support team taking care of refresh issues for your department or organization. You could even send notifications to external recipients if you added them to an email-enabled group, although this might be a less common scenario. It could also be an automated system mailbox that processes the notifications and forwards them to an on-call employee or takes other actions. Whatever your requirements, sending refresh failure notifications to others in addition to the dataset owner is helpful to ensure issues get noticed and addressed in a timely manner.
You can also uncheck the Send refresh failure notification emails to me checkbox but keep the additional recipients in the Email these users when the refresh fails textbox. In this configuration, Power BI keeps sending refresh notifications to the specified recipients but excludes the dataset owner. This configuration might be useful for custom solutions based on the Power BI REST API that maintain datasets programmatically by using a dedicated user account with an unmonitored mailbox. It could also be useful if the owner of a dataset changes frequently, but you want to ensure that a fixed set of recipients continues to receive the notifications.
If you don’t want to generate any refresh notification emails, make sure the Send refresh failure notification emails to me checkbox is unchecked and the Email these users when the refresh fails textbox is empty.
And that’s it! Sending refresh notifications to others can deliver significant value, enabling you to monitor your scheduled refreshes more reliably and more effortlessly than before. It is a much-requested feature with hundreds of votes across multiple suggestions at https://ideas.powerbi.com. Take advantage of this new capability and let us know of any additional requirements you might have through the usual Power BI community channels or as comments to this article below.