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About the Power BI Service collector

Use this collector to harvest metadata from Power BI. Users can then:

  • Discover Power BI reports and dashboards across your enterprise’s Power BI workspaces.

  • Perform impact analysis to understand how changes to upstream data sources impact Power BI reports.

Important things to note:

  • This collector only harvests from the Power BI Service. It does not harvest Power BI desktop (pbix) files unless these files are uploaded to Power BI cloud service.

  • This collector does not harvest from Power BI Report Server. There is a separate collector available for Power BI Report Server.

Important

The Power BI Service collector can be run in the Cloud or on-premise using Docker or Jar files.

Note

The latest version of the Collector is 2.200. To view the release notes for this version and all previous versions, please go here.

What is cataloged

The collector catalogs the following information.

Table 1.

Object

Information collected

Workspaces

Title

Apps

Title

Reports

Title, External URL, Embed URL

Report Pages

Title

Dashboards

Title, External URL, Embed URL

Dashboard tiles

Title, Embed URL

Data Sources

Title, Data source type

Datasets

Title, External URL

Dataflows

Title, Last modified, Description

Power BI Tables (Datasets and Dataflows)

Title, Is hidden, Description

Power BI Columns

Title, Data type, Column type, Is hidden, Expression

File

File path, File name

File directory

Directory path

Database

Title, Type, Identifier, Server, Port

Database Schema

Title

Database Table

Title

Database Column

Title, Type

Table

Title

Column

Title, Type



  • If you are using Service Principal authentication, the collector will automatically harvest all the objects listed above except for apps, personal workspaces, user workspaces, and report pages

  • If you are using User authentication the collector will automatically harvest all the objects listed above except for personal workspaces, user workspaces, and report pages

  • If you want to harvest apps and any workspace:

    • Use the --all-workspaces-and-apps parameter. This excludes the harvesting of personal and user workspaces.

    • To harvest Personal Workspaces and My Workspaces, add the parameters:

      --include-workspace="My workspace"

      --include-workspace="PersonalWorkspace.*"

      Important

      Note that the values for both the parameters are case sensitive.

    All these parameters are described here: Generating the command or YAML file

  • To be able to harvest Report pages, you have to add the Azure Service Principal or the User to each workspace. You must do this before running the collector.

Relationships between objects

By default, the data.world catalog will include catalog pages for the resource types below. Each catalog page will have a relationship to other related resource types. Note that the catalog presentation and relationships are fully configurable, so these will list the default configuration.

Table 2.

Resource page

Relationship

App

Report, Dashboard

Power BI Column

Power BI Table

Data source

Dataset, Dataflow

Tile

Dashboard, Report

Dashboard

Tile, Workspace

Report

Tile, Workspace, Report pages, Dataset

Report Pages

Report

Dataset

Tile, Workspace, Report, Table, Data source

Workspace

Report, Dataset, Dataflow, Dashboard

Dataflow

Workspace, table, Data source

Power BI Table

Dataset, Dataflow, Power BI Column



Lineage for Power BI

The following lineage information is collected by the Power BI collector.

Table 3.

Object

Lineage available

Report

Associated Dataset

Dashboard Tile

Associated Dataset

Dataset

Associated Dataflow, Dashboard Tile, Report, and Dataset

Dataflow

Associated Column, Dataset, and Dataflow

Note: The collector is able to harvest lineage from Power BI expressions which use parameters in place of database server name, schema name, database table, or database name.

Column

Associated columns that the column sources its data from or calculates its values from.

Notes:

  • The collector is able to harvest lineage from Power BI expressions which use parameters in place of database server name, schema name, database table, or database name.

  • Column level lineage and catalog relationships are not available between columns (fields) and reports/report pages through the Power BI API.



Version supported

  • The collector supports Power BI Cloud API v 1.0.

Authentication supported

There are two separate ways to authenticate to Power BI:

  • Service principal

  • User and password

The collector will harvest metadata for all Power BI apps and workspaces to which the supplied account has access.

In this section: