SUBSCRIPTION AND ALERTING POSSIBILITIES WITH POWER BI REPORTS

Interestingly enough, I was asked a question today for certain scenario, of notifying based on triggers or subscriptions in Power BI Service and I head made this output summary for the information collected, and would share this, for any similar business Requirment case

1.?Using alerts and Power BI Service dashboards

·???????Involve New Technology Platform Power automate, needs its licensee and expertise

·???????Data-Driven based actions flexibility in control

·???????Can be managed by admins not end user configuration involvement

·???????No Extra license involved just power BI Pro

Set alerts in the Power BI service to notify you when data on a dashboard changes above or below limits you set. Alerts can only be set on tiles pinned from report visuals, and only on gauges, KPIs, and cards.

Alerts can be created on dashboards:

• that you have created and saved in?My workspace
• that have been shared with you in a?Premium reserved capacity.
• in any workspace you can access, if you have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.

Alerts only work on data that is refreshed. When data refreshes, Power BI looks to see if an alert is set for that data. If the data has reached an alert threshold, an alert is triggered.

Tips and troubleshooting

• If you are unable to set an alert for a gauge, KPI, or card, contact your Power BI admin or IT help desk for help. Sometimes alerts are turned off or unavailable for your dashboard or for specific types of dashboard tiles.
• Alerts only work on data that is refreshed. They do not work on static data. Most of the samples supplied by Microsoft are static.
• The ability to receive and view shared content requires a Power BI Pro license, a Premium Per User license, or for the report to be saved in Premium reserved capacity. For more information, read?Which license do I have?.
• Alerts can be set on visuals created from streaming datasets that are pinned from a report to a dashboard. Alerts can't be set on streaming tiles created directly on the dashboard using?Add tile?>?Custom streaming data.

Receiving alerts

When the data being tracked reaches one of the thresholds you've set, several things happen. First, Power BI checks to see if it has been more than an hour, or more than 24 hours (depending on the option you selected), since the last alert was sent. As long as the data is past the threshold, you'll get an alert.

Next, Power BI sends an alert to your Notification center and, optionally, in email. Each alert contains a direct link to your data. Select the link to see the relevant tile.

1. If you've set the alert to send you an email, you'll find something like this in your Inbox. This is an alert we set for the?Sentiment?card.

Note: You don't receive alerts every hour or every day unless the data has actually refreshed in that time

1. Power BI also adds a message to your?Notification center.
2. Open your Notification center to see the alert details.

Managing alerts

There are many ways to manage your alerts: from the dashboard tile itself, from the Power BI Settings menu, on an individual tile in the?Power BI mobile app on the iPhone?or in the?Power BI mobile app for Windows 10.

From the tile itself

1. If you need to change or remove an alert for a tile, re-open the?Manage alerts?window by selecting the alert icon?. All the alerts that you've set for that tile are displayed.
2. .To modify an alert, select the arrow to the left of the alert name.
3. .To delete an alert, select the trashcan to the right of the alert name.

From the Power BI settings menu

1. Select the gear icon from the Power BI menubar.
2. .Under?Settings?select?Alerts.
3. From here you can turn alerts on and off, open the?Manage alerts?window to make changes, or delete the alert.

Set data alerts in the Power BI mobile apps

SET DATA ALERTS IN THE POWER BI MOBILE APPS

• iPhones
• iPads
• Android phones
• Android tablets
• Windows 10 devices

You can set alerts on dashboards in the Power BI mobile apps and in the Power BI service.

Warning: Data-driven alert notifications provide information about your data. If your device gets stolen, we recommend going to the Power BI service to turn off all data-driven alert rules.

2.???Advance option of data driven alerts with Power Automate

• Involve New Technology Platform Power automate, needs its licensee and expertise
• Data Driven based actions flexibility in control
• Can be managed by admins not end user configuration involvement

Overview of the different types of flows

Power Automate is a service that you can use to automate repetitive tasks to bring efficiencies to any organizations.

You can create?cloud flows,?desktop flows, or?business process flows.

Cloud flows

Create a cloud flow when you want your automation to be triggered either automatically, instantly, or via a schedule.

1. Automated flows Create an automation that is triggered by an event such as arrival of an email from a specific person, or a mention of your company in social media. Connectors?for cloud or on-premises services connect your accounts and enable them to talk to each other.
2. Instant flows Start an automation with a click of a button. You can automate for repetitive tasks from your Desktop or Mobile devices. For example, instantly send a reminder to the team with a push of a button from your mobile device. Wide range of tasks such as requesting an approval, an action in Teams or SharePoint.
3. Scheduled flows Schedule an automation such as daily data upload to SharePoint or a database. Tasks that need to be automated on a schedule.

Desktop flows

Desktop flows are used to automate tasks on the Web or the desktop. Using?Power Automate Desktop?you can automate tasks on the desktop as well as the Web. Alternatively, you can use the two legacy methods of creating desktop flows:?Windows recorder (V1) and Selenium IDE.

Business process flows

Business process flows?provide a guide for people to get work done. They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through the processes their organization has defined for interactions that need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind. This user experience can be tailored so that people with different security roles can have an experience that best suits the work they do.

Licenses: Pricing | Microsoft Power Automate

Key Template: Trigger a flow with a Power BI data-driven alert | Microsoft Power Automate

3.?Using schedule subscriptions, and different dashboards (not Parameterized)

• Redundant - Involves creating queue-based pages- report then subscribing each page to respective team
• Not data driven, but schedule specific
• Not Parameterized
• Schedule is not flexible
• No Control on Email output
• No extra license involved just Power BI Pro

Considerations and troubleshooting

• To avoid subscription emails going to your spam folder, add the Power BI email alias ([email protected]) to your contacts. If you're using Microsoft Outlook, right-click the alias and select?Add to Outlook contacts.
• Dashboards with over 25 pinned tiles, or four pinned live report pages, may not render fully in subscription e-mails sent to users. We suggest that you contact the dashboard designer and ask them to reduce pinned tiles to less than 25 and pinned live reports to less than four to ensure that the email renders correctly.
• For dashboard email subscriptions, if any tiles have row level security (RLS) applied, those tiles will not display.
• If the links in your email (to the content) stop working, it may be that the content was deleted. In the email, beneath the screenshot, you can look to see if you subscribed yourself or if someone else subscribed you. If someone else, ask that co-worker to either cancel the emails or re-subscribe you.
• For dashboard subscriptions, certain types of tiles aren't yet supported. These include: streaming tiles, video tiles, custom web content tiles.
• Report page subscriptions are tied to the name of the report page. If you subscribe to a report page, and it gets renamed, you will have to re-create your subscription.
• If you aren't able to use the subscription feature, contact your system administrator or IT help desk. Your organization may have disabled this feature or a maximum subscriber limit may have been reached.
• Email subscriptions do not support most?custom visuals. The exception is those Power BI custom visuals that have been?certified.
• Email subscriptions are sent with the report's default filter and slicer states. Any changes to the defaults that you make after subscribing don't show up in the email.
• Paginated reports do allow you to set parameter values per subscription. See?Subscribe to a paginated report in the Power BI service?for details.
• Email subscriptions do not support R-powered Power BI visuals at this time.
• Subscriptions don't currently support bookmarks.
• Subscriptions may fail on dashboards or reports with extremely large images due to email size limits.
• Power BI automatically pauses refresh on datasets associated with dashboards and reports that haven't been visited in more than two months. However, if you add a subscription to a dashboard or report, it won't pause even if it goes unvisited.
• Keep in mind that like other BI products, the time you set your subscription for is when the subscription begins processing. Once the report processing is complete, then the subscription is queued and sent to the e-mail recipients. While we strive to process and deliver all subscriptions as quickly as possible, there are times at peak demand when you may see a longer delay due to the number of subscriptions that can be sent at once. For the majority of customers, they shouldn’t see a delay of more than 15 minutes to process and send their reports, though it may take up to 30 minutes for certain times and tenants that have significant usage. We never expect any delay in delivery to be more than 60 minutes from the time the subscription is scheduled. If any customer experiences a delay of that length, they should first ensure that the address [email protected] is on your safe sender list and isn't blocked by your e-mail provider. If the email isn't being blocked, they should contact their Power BI administrator or IT help desk for assistance.
• The full report attachment feature is available for reports that meet the following three conditions. Any existing subscriptions with full reports as attachments that do not meet these conditions are disabled and you will receive an email explaining the error.
• They're in an upgraded workspace with?Power BI Premium or Premium Per User.
• The report has fewer than 20 pages.
• The attachment file is under 25 MB in size.

Subscribe to report pages and dashboards that matter most to you, and Power BI will email a snapshot to your inbox. You tell Power BI how often you want to receive the emails: daily, weekly, or when the data refresh. You can even set a specific time for Power BI to send the emails or have it run now. In all, you can set up to 24 different subscriptions per report or dashboard.

Creating?a subscription for yourself requires a?Power BI Pro?or?Premium per user?license. You can also create a subscription for yourself if the report or dashboard resides in a Premium workspace and you have been given access to that workspace. If you are unable to create a subscription, contact your Power BI administrator or IT help desk.

Subscribing others?is only available to the dashboard or report owners who have a?Power BI Pro?or?Premium Per User (PPU)?license.

Subscribe to a dashboard or a report page

Whether you're subscribing to a dashboard or to a report, the process is similar. The same button allows you to subscribe to the Power BI service dashboards and reports.

1. Open the dashboard or report.
2. From the top menu bar, select?Subscribe?or select the envelope icon?.
3. Select?Add new subscription.

The screen on the left appears when you're on a report page and select?Subscribe. The screen on the right appears when you're on a dashboard and select?Subscribe.

a. To subscribe to more than one page in a report: Either select?Add new subscription?and select a different page from the dropdown near the top, or select the?Full report attachment as?checkbox under?Also include.

1. b. Use the yellow slider to turn the subscription on and off. Setting the slider to?Off?doesn't delete the subscription. To delete the subscription, select the trashcan icon.

c. Add at least one email address and, optionally, add a subject and email message details.

d. Select a?Frequency?for your subscription. You may choose Daily, Weekly, or After data refresh (Daily). To receive the subscription email only on certain days, select?Weekly?and choose which days you'd like to receive it. For example, if you'd like to receive the subscription email only on workdays, select?Weekly?for your frequency and un-check the boxes for Sat and Sun. If you select?Monthly, enter the day(s) of the month you wish to receive the subscription mail.

e. If you choose Daily, Hourly, Monthly, or Weekly, you can also choose a Scheduled Time for the subscription. You can have it run on the hour, or at 15, 30, or 45 minutes past. Select morning (AM) or afternoon/evening (PM). You can also specify the time zone. If you choose Hourly, select the Scheduled Time you want the subscription to start, and it will run every hour after that.

f. Schedule the start and end date by entering dates in the date fields. By default, the start time for your subscription will be the date you create it and the end date will be one year later. You can change it to any date in the future (up to the year 9999) at any time before the subscription ends. When a subscription reaches an end date, it stops until you re-enable it. You will receive notification(s) before the scheduled end date to ask if you'd like to extend it.

g. Select one or more of the checkboxes.

• Give recipients permission to open and view the report or dashboard.
• Select?Go to report/dashboard?to add a "Go to report" link to the body of the email.
• Add a thumbnail preview of the report page to the body of the email.
• Add the full report as an attachment instead of only a single report page and select either PDF or PowerPoint. The size of the attachment is limited to no more than 20 pages and less than 25 MB. The attachment respects all privacy labels for the report.

h. To review your subscription and test it out, select?Run now. This sends the email to you right away.

1. If everything looks good, select?Save and close?to save the subscription. You will receive an email and snapshot of the dashboard or report on the schedule you set. All subscriptions that have the frequency set to?After data refresh?will only send an email after the first scheduled refresh on that day.

Manage your subscriptions

Only you can manage the subscriptions you create. Select Subscribe again and choose Manage all subscriptions from the bottom left corner (see screenshots above). The subscriptions for the current workspace display. For help understanding workspaces, see Workspaces in Power BI. see all subscriptions in My Workspace

You will be able to refresh the report page but not the dataset. Only the dataset owner can manually refresh a dataset. To look up the owner’s name of the underlying dataset(s), open the report and select the dropdown from the menu bar.

4.?Using schedule subscriptions, (Parameterized)

• Efforts: Involves recreating reports in Power bi Report builder (SSRS for Power BI) a bit time consuming
• Needs Premium capacity, Workspace License
• No-data driven triggered
• Parameterized subscription
• Very good Tabular data representation

What are paginated reports in Power BI Premium?

Paginated reports?are designed to be printed or shared. They're called?paginated?because they're formatted to fit well on a page. They display all the data in a table, even if the table spans multiple pages. They're also called?pixel perfect?because you can control their report page layout exactly. Power BI Report Builder is the standalone tool for authoring paginated reports for the Power BI service.

You can now set up email subscriptions for yourself and others for paginated reports in the Power BI service. In general, the process is the same as subscribing to reports and dashboards in the Power BI service. This article spells out the differences and considerations.

In setting up subscriptions, you choose how often you want to receive the emails: daily, weekly, monthly, or hourly. You can also choose the time(s) you'd like the subscription to run. There is no limit to the number of subscriptions you may set for every report.

Paginated reports often have many pages. For example, this report has 563 pages. Each page is laid out exactly, with one page per invoice, and repeating headers and footers.

You can preview your report in Report Builder, then publish it to the Power BI service, app.powerbi.com. You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to publish a report to the service. You can publish and share paginated reports in your My Workspace or in workspaces, as long as the workspace is in a Power BI Premium capacity. Also, a Power BI admin needs to enable paginated reports in the?Premium capacities section?of the Power BI admin portal

Create reports in Power BI Report Builder

Paginated reports have their own design tool, Power BI Report Builder. It's a new tool that shares the same foundation as the tools you'd previously used to create paginated reports for Power BI Report Server or SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). In fact, paginated reports that you create for SSRS 2016 and 2017 or for Power BI Report Server on-premises, are compatible with the Power BI service. The Power BI service maintains backwards compatibility so you can move your reports forward, and you can upgrade any previous-version paginated reports. Not all report features are available at launch.

Report from a variety of data sources

A single paginated report can have a number of different data sources. It doesn't have an underlying data model, unlike Power BI reports. For the initial release of paginated reports in the Power BI service, you create embedded data sources and datasets in the report itself. For now, you can't use shared data sources or shared datasets. You create reports in Report Builder on your local computer. If a report connects to on-premises data, after you upload the report to the Power BI service, you need to create a gateway and redirect the data connection. Here are the data sources you can connect to at this time:

• Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse (via Basic and oAuth)
• Azure Analysis Services (via SSO)
• SQL Server via a gateway
• SQL Server Analysis Services via a gateway
• Power BI Datasets
• Oracle
• Teradata

Considerations for paginated report subscriptions

u can now set up email subscriptions for yourself and others for paginated reports in the Power BI service. In general, the process is the same as subscribing to reports and dashboards in the Power BI service.

You don't need edit permissions to the paginated report to create a subscription for yourself, but you must have edit permissions to create one for someone else in your organization. If you have at least a Contributor role in the workspace where the paginated report is, then you can create subscriptions for others in your organization. Read more about Roles in workspaces.

To subscribe external users who are not members of your organization, the external user must first onboard using B2B (Business to business).

Unlike subscriptions for dashboards or Power BI reports, your subscription contains an attachment of the entire report output. The following attachment types are supported: PDF, PowerPoint presentation (PPTX), Excel Workbook (XLSX), Word Document (DOCX), CSV file, and XML.

You may include a preview image of the report in the email body. This is optional, and may differ slightly than the first page of your attached report document, depending on the attachment format you select.

The maximum report attachment size is 25 MB.

You can subscribe other users in your organization to paginated reports that connect to any currently supported data sources, including Azure Analysis Services or Power BI datasets. Keep in mind the report attachment reflects the data based on your permissions.

Email subscriptions can be sent with either the currently selected or default parameters for your report. You may set different parameter values for each subscription you create for your report.

If your report author has set expression-based parameters (for example, the default is always today's date), the subscription uses that as the default value. You can change other parameter values and choose to use current values, but unless you explicitly change that value as well, the subscription uses the expression-based parameter.

There is no After Data Refresh option for frequency with paginated reports. You always get the latest values from the underlying data source.

References :

What are paginated reports in Power BI Premium? - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Subscribe to paginated reports in the Power BI service - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Set data alerts in the Power BI service - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Subscribe yourself to reports and dashboards - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Subscribe others to your reports and dashboards - Power BI | Microsoft Docs