Power BI and Flow - Alert Management

Power BI offers the capability to set alerts on different tiles of your dashboard. In this week post I'll show how you can use Microsoft Flow to get more out of your alerts.

Create a Flow triggered by a Power BI alert

I created a Dashboard out of my last week post to see how many people filled out the form and how satisfied they are. I got three tiles with "Count of Responder", "Average of Awesomeness" and the suggested topics.

I would like to create an alert when the average of awesomeness drops below 4. Therefore I hit the three dots at the top right corner of the tile and choose "Manage alerts". A new window pops up.

I select "+ Add alert rule" and fill out everything - Alert title, Condition, Maximum notification frequency and if Power BI should send me an email. In this case I deselect this option because I would like to manage it over Microsoft Flow. Before using the link at the bottom to switch to Microsoft Flow I have to save my alert first. Therefore I select Save and close. Afterwards I reopen the window by selecting the three dots of the tile and choose manage alerts again. Now I select my new created alert and hit "Use Microsoft Flow to trigger additional actions" at the bottom. flow.microsoft.com will open in a new window / tab where I have to confirm the connection with "Continue".

At this moment I can start customize a Flow triggered by an alert from Power BI. To do so I have to choose which alert I would like to use. In this scenario I have only one called "Alert for Average of Awesomeness".

Now I add a new action by hitting "+ New step" - "Add an action". In this example I just use a notification action to send me an email.

As subject of the mail I choose "Alert title" from the Dynamic content. As body I choose my own text to contain the "Alert treshhold", "Tile value" and the "Tile URL" to get the most important info.

Hint: If you can't see all Dynamic content select "See more" to get all of them.

After saving I can test my Flow. For demo purpose I submit another response with only 1 point to Awesomeness. This will drop the average to 3.33 and my alert should be triggered which means my flow should also be triggered.

It works! I got an email with the provided content. Awesome! Now I could customize my Flow to save all alerts in a SharePoint List to create a new Power BI Report out of it. Further I could create tweets or LinkedIn articles if an alert is triggered. Use your imagination. :)

Additional information

To be able to manage alerts you'll need a Power BI Pro license or a dashboard has to be shared with you from a Premium Capacity. Further alerts can only be set on tiles pinned from report visuals, and only on gauges, KPIs and cards.

For example: Alerts can be set on visuals created from streaming datasets that have been pinned from a report to a dashboard, but cannot be set on streaming tiles created directly on the dashboard using Add tile - Custom streaming data.

More information can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-set-data-alerts

As always, I hope this post was helpful. If so let me know down in the comments or via Forms (https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR2YHJoiQ1JZPhvZf1WB1B_9UNzhYTjREM1lHUUtTU1ZFTTVFSDRNVlFERS4u, will be available for some weeks) and of course if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Stay tuned!