So far, data alerts were not possible natively in Power BI unless when using dashboards. Actually, these kind of alerts were one of the main reasons people used dashboards in the Power BI Service at all.
With Data Activator (which is similar to Power Automate but built into Fabric / Power BI) we can now set data alerts natively in the Power BI Service for reports.
Data Activator must be turned on in the Power BI tenant (admin) settings:
And it is also only available in these regions.
In the documentation, it actually states that the report where the data alert is set, needs to reside in a Fabric workspace.
However, when testing, it also worked in a Premium capacity workspace.
This is how you can create a data alert:
1) Open a report in the Power BI Service and click on a visual header of your choice and select "Set alert"
Not all visual types are available yet, see this link for the latest visuals included.
As of Dec 5th 2023, the following is available:
Column and bar charts
Ribbon chart
Line
Area
Pie
Donut
Gauge
Card
KPIs
Bing Map
Filled Map
Azure Map
Arc GIS map
2) You will get the menu below to define your data alert
3) After you created the alert, you will see that there is a new item (a so called reflex item) in your workspace.
4) When clicking on it, you can update your triggers and actions later on as well.
5) This is how your alert might look when triggered (besides email alerts, there are also Teams message alerts)
Some things to consider:
Make sure to turn off all notifications before deleting the reflex items.
I just deleted mine without turning them off and now I am still getting notifications but am unable to disable them since the artifacts dont exist anymore.
I hope Microsoft will fix this at some point otherwise I will get a hundred emails a day.