Calling The Power BI Enhanced Refresh API From Power Automate, Part 5: Getting A Dataset’s Refresh History

In the last post in this series I showed how to get the status of an individual Power BI dataset refresh. In this post I’ll show how to get the history of a dataset’s refreshes and save it to a file in OneDrive for Business – useful if you want to do some analysis on refresh performance or the causes of failures.

This is one of the most straightforward things to do with the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API , especially once you’ve already got a custom connector created in the way I’ve shown in the previous posts in this series. You just need to add a new Action to your custom connector, fill in the General section:

…then in the Request section use Import from sample with the GET verb on the following URL (for Get Refresh History In Group):

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/datasets/{datasetId}/refreshes?$top={$top}

The only thing to do after this is edit the optional $top query parameter (which allows you to limit the number of refreshes whose history you return) so it takes an integer rather than a string:

Update the custom connector and you can now use it in a simple Flow to save the JSON returned by the call to the API into a JSON file:

You can then connect to this data very easily via Power Query, for example:

Rather than trigger a Flow like this manually, in the real world you’d want to run it on a schedule, perhaps every day. You’d then end up with a folder full of JSON files you could analyse and as much history stored as you wanted. It should be possible to load and dedupe this data (multiple JSON files will contain overlapping refresh history) using Power BI dataflows and/or datamarts but that’s something I’ll leave for another blog post…