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Use Power BI with Azure Purview to achieve better data governance and discovery

Headshot of article author Yaron Canari

With the massive growth of Power BI within organizations, and the consequently vast amounts of data generated, our customers face increased challenges around governing their data, and around discovering the right, high-quality data that can be trusted to drive critical business decisions.

To address these challenges, Power BI has partnered with the newly released Azure Purview to provide enhanced governance and cataloging capabilities for our customers. The Azure Purview/Power BI integration makes it possible for you to discover and govern all your hybrid data, and thereby gain a more complete understanding of your data.

 

 

Here are some of the key scenarios you can now achieve using Azure Purview with Power BI.

Effective data governance and privacy

With just a few clicks, you can register Power BI in Azure Purview and start a scheduled and incremental (roll-out by end of year) data scan. The metadata of Power BI assets, as well as information about their lineage across Power BI workspaces and their connections to data sources, are then available in Azure Purview.

End-to-End data lineage: In Azure Purview you can now track your organizational data journey across your various Azure services/data sources, all the way down to the Power BI assets, including dataflows, datasets, reports, and dashboards, that are connected to them. This enables easy troubleshooting and deeper analysis of your BI projects. For example, you can detect the Azure Data Factory job that is responsible for the transformation of the data outside of Power BI.

Data source impact analysis: If you’re planning to make changes in the data, you can quickly understand the impact those changes might have across your whole data estate.

Define a business glossary: You can assign glossary terms to Power BI content and use them to enable better browsing and search capabilities so that users can find the data they need. Using Azure Purview with Power BI enables effortless discovery of trusted and accurate data.

Find trustworthy data: To better support the discovery of high-quality data, certification or promotion labels set on your data assets in Power BI will be also be displayed in Azure Purview*, making it easier for data owners and business users to discover those endorsed assets and make business-critical decisions based on trustworthy data. Read more about the new Power BI endorsement capabilities here. *Displaying endorsement labels in Azure Purview will be released soon – stay tuned.

Keep your data protected across your data estate: When you use Azure Purview with Power BI, you see in Azure Purview the Power BI content with the sensitivity labels that were applied in the Power BI service. Then, in Azure Purview, you can answer such questions as what types of sensitive data do I have, and where exactly is this sensitive data located. You also gain the ability to search for and find data according to the sensitivity label it’s tagged with.

Get Started with Power BI and Azure Purview

Read more about Azure Purview

Note:  When setting up your scanner, please make sure you go through the configuration step on Power BI Admin portal. Instructions are specified in this article: Get Started with Power BI and Azure Purview. Pay extra attention to use the right tenant admin switch as marked in green in the image below.

Additional resources

Watch this webinar to learn more: Enable Greater Data Agility with Azure Purview and Power BI.