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Visualizing Power BI Refresh in Real-Time

Phil Seamark doesn’t have time to wait:

I recently wrote an article showing how you can visualise a dataset refresh using Power BI. It was a pretty cool way to show some of the internal workings of what otherwise is a black box. The idea from my earlier article uses SSMS Profiler to run a trace against a database hosted in Azure AS, or Power BI Premium. Once the refresh is complete, you import the results of the SSMS Profiler trace into a Power BI report to analyse. The approach requires you to wait until the refresh is complete before you can start exploring the data.

Also recently, I had the opportunity work on some large models that took a long time to refresh. I wondered what might be required to update the earlier process to study the results while the refresh was underway. Does that make me too impatient? Here is what I ended up building.

Click through to enjoy the fruits of Phil’s impatience. This is quite the interesting solution, especially if you’re twiddling your thumbs and wondering if this refresh will ever wrap up.