Administering Power BI for an Organization

The management and administrative processes described in previous chapters have primarily reflected the role of corporate business intelligence teams and BI professionals. In this chapter, the features and processes relevant to IT administrators are reviewed. These features and processes help organizations deploy and manage Power BI according to their policies and preferences. This includes data governance in the context of both self-service BI and corporate BI, the Power BI admin portal, monitoring user activity and adoption, and the administration of Power BI Premium capacity.

As in the previous chapter, this chapter exclusively covers the Power BI service. Administrative topics relevant to on-premises deployments were included in Chapter 12, Deploying the Power BI Report Server. Additionally, although data governance concepts and implementation guidance are included, readers are encouraged to review Microsoft documentation for further...

Power BI administrator role

Within organizations, one or more Power BI administrators are responsible for the overall monitoring, configuration, and management of the Power BI tenant. This role was covered briefly in the Power BI admin section of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects.

As explained in that chapter, Power BI administrators are focused on the overall deployment of Power BI within an organization in terms of security, governance, and resource utilization. It is the Power BI administrator’s job to understand the overall organizational policies and governance regarding data security and management and then implement those policies and governance within Power BI.

Similar to a database administrator (DBA), a Power BI administrator regularly fields questions and issues related to stability, performance, and permissions/access. Effective Power BI admins are therefore fully knowledgeable of the roles, permissions, and licensing in Power BI as well as tools and...

Data governance for Power BI

Data governance is defined as a set of policies used to secure an organization’s data, ensure consistent and accurate decision making, and manage access to data. In general, data governance is applicable to all types of business intelligence (BI), but organizations investing in Power BI for the long term should consider their data governance strategy and policies in the specific context of Power BI.

A central component of data governance relates to the three deployment modes described at the beginning of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects, and seeks to address the following question: “How can we ensure our data is secure and accurate while still providing the business with the access and flexibility it needs?”

It’s generally understood that some level of self-service BI (SSBI) is appropriate and beneficial to empower business users to explore and discover insights into data. Tools, such as Power BI Desktop, and features...

Azure Active Directory

As with other Microsoft Azure services, Power BI relies on Azure Active Directory (AAD) to authenticate and authorize users. Therefore, even if Power BI is the only service being utilized, organizations can leverage AAD’s rich set of identity management and governance features, such as conditional access policies, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and business-to-business collaboration.

For example, a conditional access policy can be defined within the Azure portal that blocks access to Power BI based on the user’s network location, or that requires MFA given the location and the security group of the user. Instructions for creating conditional access policies are covered in the Conditional access policies section later in this chapter.

Additionally, organizations can invite external users as guest users within their AAD tenant to allow for seamless distribution of Power BI content to external parties, such as suppliers or customers....

Power BI admin portal

The Power BI admin portal provides controls for administrators to manage the Power BI tenant for their organization. This includes settings governing who in the organization can utilize which features, how Power BI Premium capacity is allocated, and other settings such as embed codes and custom visuals.

The admin portal is accessible to Microsoft 365 global administrators and users mapped to the Power BI administrator role. The Power BI administrator role and the assignment of a user to this role in Microsoft 365 were described in the Power BI project roles section of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects.

To open the admin portal, log in to the Power BI service and select the Admin portal item from the Settings (gear icon) menu in the top right, as shown in Figure 14.9:

Figure 14.9: Admin portal in the Settings menu

Note that depending on screen resolution and zoom settings, the gear, bell, and other icons may not appear and instead be...

Usage metrics reports

The Power BI service provides standard usage metrics reports for both dashboards and reports. These reports, which themselves are Power BI reports, provide quick insights into fundamental user adoption questions, such as how often the published content is being viewed and which users are viewing the content the most.

These read-only reports can be generated for specific dashboards and reports and can also be personalized (edited) by saving a copy. Once a copy of a usage metrics report has been saved, a Power BI dataset of usage metrics is created for either all the dashboards or all the reports in the workspace. The usage metrics datasets, which are updated by the Power BI service for the last 90 days of activity, and the saved usage reports can then serve as a foundation for a lightweight but robust monitoring solution for the workspace.

For example, the Global Sales app described in the previous chapter contains several dashboards and reports, with...

Audit logs

Power BI activities stored in the Microsoft 365 audit logs provide administrators with a complete view of user activities in the Power BI service. Each log event record identifies the user, the date and time of the activity, the type of activity, such as the printing of a report page, and the item in Power BI, such as the report that was printed. This level of detail at the tenant level across all primary activities helps administrators answer both high-level usage and adoption questions, as well as targeted compliance questions.

For example, the audit logs could prove that the volume of users and their level of engagement with Power BI reports and dashboards is increasing and thus that additional capacity is required or that the organization might benefit from a move to Premium capacity. Alternatively, an administrator could investigate the activities of just a few users to ensure they’re only engaging in activities aligned with their role.

As explained...

The Power BI REST API for admins

Although the Power BI admin portal and the Power Platform Admin Center portal provide easy graphical tools for common and simple administrative tasks, the Power BI REST APIs provide programmatic access to many administration-focused endpoints, such as for retrieving artifact access for a given user, restoring deleted workspaces, and rotating encrypting keys.

Power BI administrators and BI/IT managers are therefore encouraged to review the documentation on the Power BI REST APIs (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi) and to consider incorporating these APIs into standard admin processes.

One relatively new and very powerful admin API is GetGroupsAsAdmin. This API can be called to retrieve up to 5,000 workspaces and include the users, reports, dashboards, datasets, dataflows, and workbooks associated with each given workspace. The JSON output of this single API call can then be loaded to a monitoring SQL database or potentially...

Summary

This chapter reviewed the features and processes applicable to administering Power BI for an organization. These included the configuration of tenant settings in the Power BI admin portal, analyzing the usage of Power BI assets, and monitoring overall user activity via the Microsoft 365 audit logs. Additionally, important administrative capabilities of Azure Active Directory, such as conditional access policies and external guest users, were also described.

The following chapter looks at the options for scaling Power BI to support increased user adoption, larger datasets, and enterprise BI solutions through the use of Premium capacities. This includes methodologies for allocating Power BI Premium capacity to workloads, leveraging the additional benefits of Power BI Premium, and other activities related to using Power BI at scale.

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