How to update a Power BI Dashboard automatically in Dynamics 365 CE CRM

If you have ever used Power BI dashboards in Dynamics 365 CE CRM systems you might have encountered a common restriction. When you log in to Power BI cloud service and activate "automatic refresh" of a dataset/dashboard you see that you can only specify fixed update times. In addition, you have a certain limit of daily refreshes,... around eight or something.

Especially in today's fast-paced world, this is not really convenient for most clients. So there are multiple ways to solve those issues, and in this brief piece, I will show you one very quick and easy-to-use solution. One way would be to use the Power BI APIs for such a problem (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/). However, for most Dynamics CE 365 CRM use-cases this might be a little overkill. Why use code if there is a no-code solution, which is really the idea behind this whole Power Platform thing, ...isn't it?

For this demonstration, I have built a very small and simple dashboard that shows values from existing opportunities in a small piechart.

So how are we actually updating this natively embedded Power BI dashboard if an opportunity is created, deleted, or modified? The solution is called "Power Automate" (previously known as "Flow").

For this exact problem, it was sufficient to create a new "automated cloud flow" that used Dataverse as a connector, checks if an opportunity was created, modified, or deleted, and then used the Power BI connector to update my Dashboard. However, you can use it for whatever you want.

This is all described in the very good blog post by Nikhil Gaekwad (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/refresh-your-power-bi-dataset-using-microsoft-flow/). You can build such a flow in like 3 min. create 2-3 new opportunities and see if your dashboard updates - which most of the time it will if you have not changed any important settings.