The enterprise data landscape continues to grow in volume and velocity as organizations leverage data to make informed business decisions and stay competitive in today’s evolving marketplace. It’s important to get an accurate view of an organization’s data with trust, as key business decisions are made from this data. Recent integrations between Azure Purview and Power BI enable greater data agility.
Azure Purview is a unified data governance service that enables organizations to easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of their data landscape, including on-premises, software as a service (SaaS), and multi-cloud platforms, 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 this blog you’ll learn about some of the benefits of the Purview/Power BI integration, such as being able to search and browse Power BI assets, explore enhanced dataset metadata, trace end-to-end data lineage, and open Power BI to drill down on datasets for further analysis.
Getting started
To take advantage of the integration, you must first perform the following steps:
- 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: See this documentation for details. Be sure to add the Purview Managed identity to the security group that allows service principals to use read-only Power BI admin APIs.
- Enhance admin APIs responses with detailed metadata (Preview): See this documentation for details.
- Enhance admin APIs responses with DAX and mashup expressions (Preview): See this documentation for details. Purview support for the functionality enabled by this switch will be available in the future.
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.
2. Register and scan in Azure Purview
- Register the Power BI tenant in Azure Purview. See this documentation for details.
- Perform a full scan in Azure Purview to get all the workspaces and the metadata and lineage of assets. Subsequently, Purview will perform incremental scans on workspaces that have changed since the previous scan.
Once you’ve performed the above two steps, try out the new capabilities enabled by Purview and Power BI working together!
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.
Explore enhanced metadata in Power BI datasets
- Select a Power BI dataset from your search result to see the sensitive 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 Azure Preview account to try the generally available features.
- Read the documentation about how to scan Power BI metadata
- Read the documentation about how to register and scan a Power BI tenant in Azure Purview