Our Power BI dashboard stopped working

We ran into an interesting problem the other day when our internal app.PowerBI.com dashboard just stopped automatically updating. I tried to force a manual refresh but received this rather unhelpful error message.

Here’s how we fixed it.

After some back and forth with the PowerBI support team, we realised that the issue might have something to do with the oAuth security tokens stored in Zendesk. We were able to connect to the Zendesk data using the PowerBI desktop application which generated a new oAuth request. From there, we queried Zendesk support on how to delete the oAuth tokens manually so we could recreate them.

The support guys at Zendesk have been pretty fantastic and this time was no exception. They quickly sent through instructions for deleting the existing oAuth tokens. They linked us to a page with a curl command that would revoke the tokens stored on Zendesk. After downloading curl and running the command we were back in action and our data was live again! Here is how you can do the same thing.

If you’re using Windows, download the latest version of curl.exe from http://www.paehl.com/open_source. You’ll need the version that includes WinSSL, since that’s how we’ll connect to your Zendesk platform. Unpack the 7zip archive and open a command prompt to the extracted “curl_X64_ssl\winssl” directory.

You can query the stored tokens using this command (remember to substitute the values in the curly braces with your own):
curl.exe https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/oauth/tokens.json -v -u {emailaddress}:{password}

Which returned the following output:

This gives us information about the current oAuth token, including the token ID (in red) which we could now use to revoke the token:
curl https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/oauth/tokens/{ID from the last command}.json -X DELETE -v -u {emailaddress}:{password}

I had to do this a couple of times to delete all tokens. Be careful running this command if you have other applications that integrate with Zendesk – if you delete the wrong token you will break them. In our case, we only connected Zendesk with PowerBI and no other application so I just deleted all tokens. Once they were gone, I deleted the Zendesk data and dashboards from PowerBI and then reconnected to the service using the “Get Data” menu. As expected, this prompted me to authenticate so PowerBI and Zendesk could create a new token.

Everything was all good after this point and my automatic update was working again. If you’re interested in PowerBI and Office 365 or if you want to get more value out of your existing subscription then get in touch and we can build something that works for you.