We are happy to announce that the Scanner APIs for extracting tenant-level metadata using Power BI Admin REST APIs are now in general availability (GA).
Power BI Admin APIs, along with a .NET SDK, enable administrators to create their own custom-made solutions based on Power BI metadata and lineage. The idea for this functionality was born out of thinking about how to improve the efficiency and performance of the Power BI scan, so that it could support large numbers of data assets while still conforming to the security practices of organizations.
In the past, to get a full scan of Power BI assets, data source metadata, and lineage, you had to call multiple APIs. Now we’ve released unified Async APIs that can get you all the required metadata and lineage information in an efficient and reliable way.
The time it now takes for a full scan of large tenants can be just minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks as in the past, and the number of failures has gone down significantly.
Service Principal authentication for read-only scanner Admin APIs
To better support the security constraints of some organizations, we have added service principal support for the scanner Admin APIs. Service principal is an authentication method that can be used to let an Azure AD application access Power BI APIs. With this authentication method, you no longer have to maintain a service account with an admin role. Rather, to allow your app to use the Admin APIs, you just have to give your approval once, as part of the tenant settings configuration. You can read more about it in our documentation.
Incremental scan
We have also designed support for an incremental scan, giving customers the flexibility to scan only those workspaces that have changed since the last time they were scanned. Using the incremental scan can reduce scanning time significantly, and save resources, both for the customer and for the Power BI service. Note: incremental scan is supported for up to 30 days back.
Licensing
No special license is required for using the enhanced scanner APIs. It works for all of your tenant metadata, including non-Premium workspaces.
This release has been focused on enabling you to start building out your homegrown scanning solutions, based on the metadata and lineage of your tenant’s assets. It is an exciting milestone for us and we are sure it is for you too!
You can read more about it in our documentation, metadata scanning and metadata scanning setup.