Power BI - Setting up Auto-Refresh in the Power BI Service

Introduction

This guide provides detailed steps for configuring automatic data refreshes in the Power BI service. It covers things like scheduling refreshes, setting data source credentials, and configuring refresh frequencies, ensuring your data is always up to date.  Before you get started please ensure the following pre-requisites are in place: 

  • Ensure that you have at least a Microsoft PowerBI Pro licence.
  • Your administrator has assigned you a Member or Contributor role within PowerBI (if you’re not an Admin yourself).  Read more about roles in workspaces in Power BI. 
  • A system login to the data warehouse.  This is a generic login or PowerBI to connect to our data warehouse, and should not be your login, or any other named user.   Logins are typically assigned a name PowerBIService<YourTrainingProvider> or ETL<YourTrainingProvider>.  If you do not have a login for your organisation, please request one from support@bud.co.uk

How to: Set Up Auto-Refresh in the Power BI Service

  1. Go to powerbi.com in your browser and log in if requested
  2. On the left-hand side, navigate to Workspaces, and then to the workspace you published to. You should see your report listed under Reports, and the associated dataset listed under Datasets

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  1. Click the 3 dots next to the dataset and select Schedule refresh:

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  2. You’ll then be taken to this page:
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  3. Under Data source credentials, select Edit credentials.
    Enter the PowerBIService/ETL credentials here that have been provided by Bud. This will be the special login set up for PowerBI to connect to our data warehouse, and should not be your login, or any other named user.  Logins are typically ETL<YourTrainingProvider> or PowerBIService<YourTrainingProvider>

    Select Basic Authentication method and Private privacy setting.  Do not select the box at the bottom.
                                              
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6. Under Scheduled refresh, configure the refresh as follows, and hit Apply.

For a daily refresh we suggest setting it to 5:30 am:

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Enter your email address where shown to receive any failure notifications

For a 2-hourly refresh, we suggest the following times, ensuring it is on GMT/UTC.

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  1. Test that the refresh is set up correctly by selecting Refresh now from the Dataset on the left-hand side of the screen:

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  2. After a few minutes, check that the refresh was successful, here:

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