Power BI Connector: Overview

Available from release 2020.4

The OCF connector for Power BI was developed by Alation and is available on demand. Create a ticket with Alation Support about receiving the Power BI connector package.

This connector should be used to catalog Power BI as a Business Intelligence source in Alation. The connector catalogs Power BI objects such as Workspaces, Dashboards, and Reports. It enables end users to search and find Power BI objects from the Alation user interface.

Team

The following administrators are required to install this connector:

• Alation Server Admin/Linux Administrator:

  • Installs the connector

  • Creates a Power BI source

  • Provisions Alation API tokens

• Azure Administrator:

  • Creates an Application in Azure Cloud

  • Provisions Application ID, Tennant ID, and Secret Key

  • Grants consent to access Power BI APIs

• Power BI Administrator:

  • Creates a Power BI service ID

  • Provides access to Power BI workspaces.

Scope

The table below shows what features are covered by the connector.

Feature	Scope	Availability
Power BI Instance	Catalog Power BI instance in an Azure Cloud Environment	Yes
Workspaces	Catalog workspaces in Power BI	Yes
Workspace Description	Extract Description of a workspace	No
Filter Workspaces	Ability to include or exclude specific workspaces	Yes
Reports	Catalog reports in a Workspace	Yes
Report Objects	Catalog report objects such as charts and tables	Yes
Report object dimensions, measures, expressions	Catalog dimensions, measures, and measure expressions of report objects	Yes*
Report object data sources	Catalog data sources used by report objects	Yes
Report object lineage	Catalog the lineage of a report object	No**
Filter Reports	Ability to include or exclude specific Reports	No
Report Owner	Owners or Authors who created a report	No
Auto generated report object titles	Ability to capture auto generated report object titles by Power BI	No
Dashboards	Catalog dashboards in a workspace	Yes***
Dashboard object Measures & Dimensions	Catalog dimensions and measure of a dashboard object	No
Applications	Catalog applications	No
Filter Applications	Ability to include or exclude specific applications	No
Dataflows	Catalog dataflows	No
Datasets	Catalog datasets	Yes****
Image Preview	Ability to show a thumbnail image of reports and dashboards	No
Popularity	Popularity of Dashboards & Reports	No
Security Replication	Replicate access control to reports and dashboards	No

* - Report dimensions, measures, and expressions can be cataloged only if access to the underlying PBIX files is available. DAX expressions are not available.

** - APIs to get data source information from Microsoft are not available.

*** - Can catalog only dashboards and tiles. API to get fields of tiles is not available.

**** - Only fields that are present in reports are populated as dataset fields as there is no separate API from Microsoft.

Power BI Objects Hierarchy

The following diagram shows the hierarchy of Power BI objects and how they are cataloged in Alation:

Power BI APIs

The following table lists the Power BI APIs used by this connector to extract metadata from Power BI:

Type	API End Point	Description
Authentication	https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/token	Gets the access token for authentication
Workspace	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups	Gets workspaces
Reports	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports	Gets reports from a workspace
Report Pages	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports/{reportId}/pages	Gets pages from a report
Tiles	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/dashboards/{dashboardId}/tiles	Gets tiles from a report
Datasets	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/datasets	Gets datasets for a report
Data sources	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/datasets/{datasetId}/datasources	Gets data sources for each dataset
Dashboards	https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/dashboards	Gets dashboards from a workspace