The enterprise data landscape continues to grow in volume and velocity as organizations leverage data to make informed business decisions and to stay competitive. It’s important to get an accurate view of an organization’s data, no matter where it resides, as key business decisions are made from this data. Recent integrations between Microsoft Purview and Power BI enable greater data agility.
Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance service that enables organizations to easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of their data landscape across on-premises, software as a service (SaaS), and multi-cloud sources, with automated data discovery. With Power BI integrations, data consumers are empowered to find valuable, trustworthy, sensitive data, and provide end-to-end data lineage for analytics users to build and trace key business metrics to the origins of the data.
In the following sections, you will learn about the mechanics of the Microsoft Purview and Power BI integrations.
Enable enhanced metadata scanning
As a Power BI admin, log in to the Power BI admin portal, go to the tenant settings, find the Admin API settings section, and enable the following three feature switches:
- Allow service principals to use read-only Power BI admin APIs: In order for Purview to be able to scan Power BI, the Power BI admin must setup authentication by creating a security group, adding the Purview Managed identity to the security group, and enabling the Allow service principals to use read-only Power BI admin APIs feature switch. See this documentation for details.
- Enhance admin APIs responses with detailed metadata (Preview): This setting allows Purview to scan the Power BI tenant and extract enhanced technical metadata such as tables, columns, and measures, plus business metadata such as the names and descriptions of Power BI datasets. See this documentation for details.
- Enhance admin APIs responses with DAX and mashup expressions (Preview): This setting will allow Purview to scan the Power BI tenant and extract DAX expressions and mashup queries. See this documentation for details. Although Purview does not currently support this functionality, it is recommended to enable this switch, as Purview support is coming soon.
The image below shows these feature switches in the Power BI admin portal.
Once you’ve enabled the feature switches in the Power BI admin portal, the service starts caching the tables. Enhanced metadata is returned only for Power BI datasets that have been published/republished or refreshed successfully.
Register and scan in Azure Purview
- Register the Power BI tenant in Microsoft Purview by following this documentation and the pre-requisites it contains.
- Perform a full scan in Microsoft Purview to get all the workspaces and the metadata and lineage of assets. (There’s an option to exclude personal workspaces as part of the scan.)
- For subsequent occurrences, Purview performs incremental scans on workspaces that have changed since the previous scan.
Search and browse Power BI assets
Simply start typing the name of the Power BI asset in the global search box or use the structured browse experience to discover the correct Power BI assets in Purview. Just specify the keyword of your Power BI dataset, dataflow, report, or dashboard to let Purview’s intuitive search automatically complete and find the asset by relevance based on endorsement and sensitivity label. With a few clicks, you can narrow down the search results to specific Power BI assets in Purview.
Enhanced metadata in Power BI datasets
- Select a Power BI dataset from your search result to see the sensitivity labels and endorsement metadata. Additional business metadata includes the dataset user configuration, create datetime, and description.
- Under the Schema tab, you can see the list of all the tables, columns, and measures created inside the Power BI dataset.
Trace end-to-end data lineage
In addition to the technical and business metadata, the scan of the Power BI tenant inside Purview brings in end-to-end data lineage so that data consumers can perform a variety of forward- and backward-looking scenarios, such as root-cause analysis and impact analysis.
Open in Power BI
With a single click, data consumers can open the Power BI service to the corresponding Power BI dataset for further analytics, root-cause investigation, impact analysis, management tasks, and dataset enrichment by adding more metrics.
Get started today!
- Quickly and easily create an Microsoft Purview account to try the generally available features.
- Read the documentation about how to scan Power BI metadata
- Read the about how to register and scan a Power BI tenant in Microsoft Purview