About

RefreshRadar is built and run by one person. I’m Alvaro Reis, a full-stack and Power BI developer in Miami, Florida. I graduated from UCF in December 2025 and I have a day job. This is not a company with a support team behind it, and I’d rather you know that up front than find out later.

It exists because the failure I kept running into had nothing to do with building reports. A scheduled refresh would die overnight, Power BI would email whoever happened to own the model, and the first real signal was somebody opening a dashboard full of yesterday’s numbers. Then you go digging through refresh history to translate an error string into an actual cause. I got tired of doing that lookup by hand, so I wrote it down, and then I built something to do the watching too.

That’s the whole product, and it has been live since July 2026. It watches your scheduled semantic model refreshes, and when one hard-fails it emails you the likely cause and the fix, not just a red X. The error catalog is the same reference I built for myself, free to read with no login, and the demo is the real board on sample data.

There are two things I try hard to be straight about, because they’re the ones that would annoy me as the person evaluating this. RefreshRadar needs the Contributor role on a watched workspace, because Viewer gets an HTTP 403 from the refresh history API. That is Microsoft’s rule, not a choice I made. And it reads refresh metadata only: status, timings, error codes. Never the rows inside your datasets. The security page spells out exactly what the app can and cannot do in your tenant.

If something is broken, wrong, or missing, I’m the one who reads the mail. Tell me at hello@refreshradar.com. If you’ve found a mistake in the error catalog, I especially want that one.