You can set up data alerts in Power BI on KPI, gauge and card visuals in your dashboard. By default, when an alert is triggered, you will get a notification in Power BI and an email informing you of the alert. However, you can make this workflow more sophisticated by building a flow in Power Automate. That means, when a certain alert is triggered, you can customise the actions and steps that should occur, leveraging the 500+ connectors available. Here’s how you can do it.
Firstly, from the dashboard, you can pick the visual you would like to set the alert on. Remember, alerts can only be set on KPIs, gauges and cards. You can click on … next to the visual and go to Manage alerts.
From there, you can add a rule for the alert. In the example below, I’ve set it up so that I get an email and notification once every hour if my sales goes over 5694. You will notice that there is a link that says Use Microsoft Power Automate to trigger additional actions. This will take you to a flow connected to your alert which you can customise. Alternatively, you can go to Power Automate yourself . There is a template you can use- Trigger a flow with a Power BI data-driven alert. This is just a flow that contains the Power BI trigger: When a data driven alert is triggered.
Once you have selected your alert in the trigger, you can build your flow. The flow can be anything you like.
If you are new to Power Automate and not sure what you can do, check out the Power Automate tag on my blog for tips for getting started and ideas.
In this case, I’ve just created a simple, one step workflow that will post a message to a Microsoft Teams channel.
To test it out, you’ll have to wait until the alert it triggered. I recommend making the threshold something easy to reach so that you can see the flow run sooner, then increase the threshold back to normal once it is working.
Rishona Elijah 