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Announcing Power BI lineage view GA, and introducing dataset impact analysis

Headshot of article author Yaron Canari

Several months ago, we introduced Power BI lineage view as public preview. We’re now happy to announce that lineage view is generally available!

Lineage view enables you to visualize the entire data journey from a given workspace, making it easy to determine the upstream and downstream dependencies of artifacts, examine artifact information, and take action.

The true power of lineage view reveals itself when there are reusable assets such as shared datasets or linked dataflows. You can easily track the lineage of such assets across workspaces and navigate accordingly.

The capabilities we provide for cross-workspace lineage go in two directions – upstream and downstream:

  • From the standpoint of a report or a dashboard, you can see any upstream external dataset that belongs to a different workspace. Based on your access permissions, you can navigate to the source workspace to see the details about dataset and its connected artifacts.
  • From the standpoint of a shared dataset, you can perform dataset impact analysis to see all the dataset’s downstream dependencies, whether they are located in the same workspace as the dataset or in another, external workspace.

Between public preview and today, when lineage view is GA, we have added new features and made many improvements based on your feedback.

Here are a few features we’ve added recently that we’d like to highlight.

Dataset impact analysis

As a dataset owner, you want to understand how your dataset is being used within the workspace and in other workspaces. With the dataset impact analysis, you can judge how careful you need to be when making changes to your dataset. For example, if your dataset is being used in multiple workspaces (that feed multiple apps), with hundreds of end-users consuming its data, then you will want to provide the relevant contacts heads-up notification about changes that may impact their reports so they can take any necessary action.

Desktop integration [Desktop April update]

You make changes to datasets in Power BI Desktop, and so dataset impact analysis is now available in the latest version. When you re-publish a dataset, you’ll get a message that summarizes for you the potential impact. If you want to see more details, such as usage metrics, and take action, you can click on the View impact link. This will take you to the Power BI service where you will see the full, detailed analysis.

Data source side pane [Roll out by end of April]

Lineage view gives you visibility on all the data sources (e.g. Azure SQL) used in the workspace. When you look at the cards in the view, you see some details about the data sources. To get more information, you can click on a data source card. You will then see more details about the data source, including such items as connection status and gateway information.

Usage metrics as part of lineage view

To increase your workspace management efficiency, we have added the ability to quickly view the usage metrics of your reports and dashboards. When you highlight a dataset, we show you, for each of the connected reports and dashboards, the number of viewers and the number of views for the last 30 days. With this info you can easily identify highly used datasets within the workspace, or, conversely, datasets that are not being used at all.

Contact information and additional artifacts information

When you click on the cards of datasets, dataflows, reports and dashboards, you see information about the artifact. For example, on datasets you see refresh time, next refresh time, endorsement status, sensitivity label, and the dataset’s tables, columns and measures. We have also added the contact information for every artifact, so that you can reach out to those contacts easily, asking or notifying them about anything relevant to the work you’re collaborating on.

Paginated reports lineage

Now you can see lineage for paginated reports as well. Paginated reports can be connected to multiple sources, including datasets and any other sources, such as Azure SQL. Just like with pbix reports, for paginated reports you can see the lineage both within the workspace and cross-workspace.

 

The Power BI team plans to continue addressing the challenges of the data lineage world. We encourage you to promote your ideas in the Power BI user voice.

 

Learn more about lineage view.

Learn more about dataset impact analysis.