Currently, the alert notification emails from Power BI are limited to the the user who configured the data alert. In many scenarios, however, several users or a group email account should receive the notification email and it's not practical for each user to individually configure the data alerts.
Microsoft Flow provides a powerful but easy-to-use alternative to the standard Power BI alert email. For example, without any custom data connections or code, it enables a single user to fully define one or multiple email recipients of an alert notification and to customize the content of this message.
Microsoft Flow is an online service that enables the automation of workflows between applications and services. Since each MS flow is fundamentally composed of a trigger (starting action) and one or more corresponding actions, a top use case for MS Flow is to send custom email messages based on various trigger events. For example, when a sales lead is added in Salesforce, an email could be automatically sent to a sales team member via MS Flow.
Several pre-built MS Flow templates are available that leverage the Power BI data alert as a trigger. These templates make it easy to get started and to customize details, such as email addresses and the data from the alert to include. In the following MS Flow, the Today's Average Call Length alert described in the Data alerts section is used as the trigger of a customized email via an Office 365 for Outlook account:
Power BI icons associated with the data alert trigger are available when populating the send email action via the Outlook for Office 365 connector. In the preceding screenshot, text labels with a closing colon are positioned in front of the icons to make the alert email messages easy to understand. The following sample email message reflects the preceding MS Flow configuration:
MS Flow provides a rich platform for building both simple and complex workflows to obtain greater value from Power BI assets. Other common MS Flow and Power BI integrations, beyond custom email notifications, include posting messages to a Slack channel and triggering an alert in Microsoft Teams based on an alert in Power BI.