After you connect Power BI, Elementary will automatically and continuously extend the lineage to the report/dashboard level. This will provide you end-to-end data lineage to understand your downstream dependencies, called exposures.

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Create & authorize a Service Principal

Elementary makes use of a service principal secret to authenticate with the Power BI API on your behalf. Please follow the official guide by Microsoft for creating and authorizing a service principal for Power BI. Make sure you’re going through all steps up until but not including “Step 5 - Embed your content” (Which isn’t currently our goal). Also make sure that the security group you’ve created is allowed access to every relevant Workspace in your account. Do NOTICE - “My Workspace” isn’t accessible by service principals and thus can’t be analyzed with our product.

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Allow Power BI’s Admin API

Go to Power BI’s Admin portal -> Tenant Settings -> Admin API settings Enable the following features, and apply at least for the Service principal’s security group (created on the last step):

  • Service principals can access read-only admin APIs
  • Enhance admin APIs responses with detailed metadata
  • Enhance admin APIs responses with DAX and mashup expressions

Those features will allow Elementary to get all required info for computing the data lineage graph.

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Connecting Power BI to Elementary

Navigate to the Account settings > Environments and choose the environment to which you would like to connect Elementary. Choose the Power BI connection and provide the following details to validate and complete the integration.

  • Tenant: Your Microsoft tenant which is usaully your company’s domain. e.g. my-company.com
  • Client ID: The client ID of the new Microsoft Entra app you’ve created on the first step.
  • Client Secret: The new client secret you’ve created on the first step.

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Limitations

  • Due to service principal limitations - we cannot analyze the default “My Workspace” Workspace.
  • The lineage currently doesn’t apply to the following entities: (But would be in the future)
    • Paginated Reports
    • Dataflows
    • Datamarts
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