Subscriptions and alerts

What it does

Two separate push mechanisms. Subscriptions email a snapshot of a report page or dashboard on a schedule, optionally with the full report attached. Alerts watch a number and tell you when it crosses a threshold — the classic version on dashboard tiles, and a newer report-visual version backed by Fabric Activator.

Key facts

Up to 24 subscriptions per report or dashboard, each with its own recipients, time and frequency. Paginated reports have no subscription limit.
Frequencies are hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or after data refresh (once a day only, evaluated against the first scheduled refresh, normalised to UTC).
Attaching the full report needs the workspace on capacity or PPU. Attachments cap at 20 pages and 25 MB, in PDF or PowerPoint. Paginated reports add XLSX, DOCX, CSV and XML.
Sensitivity labels are applied to the attachment but not to the email body or the preview image. If the label matters, turn the preview image off.
External recipients only work from a workspace on a paid, non-PPU capacity. Trial capacity and PPU workspaces silently suppress delivery to external addresses, and no tenant setting overrides that.
Group aliases: distribution groups, dynamic distribution groups and mail-enabled security groups work. Microsoft 365 groups and plain security groups don't.
Classic dashboard alerts sit on gauge, KPI and card tiles pinned from a report, numeric measures only, capped at 250 alerts across all your models. They're private — nobody else sees the alerts you set, including the dashboard owner.
Report-visual alerts create an Activator item behind the scenes and Activator polls the visual once an hour, so expect up to an hour of latency. As of July 2026 this is still labelled public preview.
Subscribing others needs Pro or PPU plus Contributor, Member or Admin on the workspace. B2B guests can only subscribe themselves, and internal guests can't subscribe at all.
Subscriptions to reports containing uncertified custom visuals, ArcGIS, Power Apps, Power Automate, Visio or paginated report visuals render an error symbol where the visual should be.

When to use / skip

Subscriptions are the cheapest way to keep an executive engaged with a report they'll never open voluntarily, and they're worth setting up on day one for exactly that reason. Alerts are a narrower tool — they suit a small number of genuinely actionable thresholds, not "tell me when anything moves". If a client wants notifications with real logic, branching or routing to a system rather than an inbox, go to Activator or Power Automate rather than bending alerts into a shape they don't hold.

Configuration decisions

Whether the subscription carries a preview image, which trades convenience against sensitivity labelling.
Whether it's a page snapshot or a full attachment, which decides whether you need capacity or PPU behind the workspace.
Who owns each subscription, because on an RLS model the image shows the owner's data to everyone on the list.
Which alias type the recipients use — this is the one that quietly fails, since the group types people reach for first are the two that don't work.
Whether alerts route to email only, or into a Power Automate flow or Activator item that does something downstream.

Gotchas

RLS and subscriptions are a bad combination. The static image in the email renders as the subscription owner, so a regional manager's subscription can post national numbers to everyone on the recipient list. Power BI shows a warning and people scroll past it.
Report page subscriptions are bound to the page name. Rename the page and the subscription breaks; delete it and the subscription is gone.
If you opened the report via a bookmark when creating the subscription, the subscription runs against the bookmark's filters, not the ones you thought you set.
Refresh normally pauses on models nobody has visited for two months. A subscription keeps it alive — handy, or a quiet capacity cost, depending on how many stale subscriptions the tenant has accumulated.
Subscriptions fail entirely if the tenant has Azure Private Link with public internet access blocked.
Clocks change day gives you two emails per subscription the following day.

Consultant notes

Do a subscription audit before go-live and again at handover. Old subscriptions to deleted pages and departed staff are the most common source of "Power BI is broken" tickets that aren't about Power BI.
Tell the client the RLS caveat in writing. It's the single most likely way a Power BI deployment leaks data, and it comes from a feature business users configure themselves.
Warn people that report-visual alerts are hourly-polled, not real-time. "Alert" sets an expectation the product doesn't meet, and it's better to say so than to be asked later.
Add [email protected] to the safe senders list as part of the deployment checklist. Otherwise the first week is spent explaining that the emails are in junk.

Check again once report-visual alerts leave preview, or if the external-recipient capacity rules loosen.