I was wondering if someone might have experience with this. I haven’t found a clean answer online with Microsoft or anywhere else, so I figured I would check with the community.
I don’t have a file to specifically upload or share, but I will give you the background for the question.
I am a BA Analyst and Power BI developer for a company. We recently went with PPU licensing and started the process of implementing the use of Power BI’s pipeline deployment.
I have admin access to both the dev and test workspaces. I do not have access to the prod workspace.
My manager wants me to do an analysis on the usage and performance metrics for the reports that are in the production workspaces.
I was reading that the prerequisites for running the usage metrics are:
You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to run and access the usage metrics data. (Which I do)
To access usage metrics for a particular dashboard or report, you must have edit access to that dashboard or report. (This is the problem area)
Your Power BI admin has to have enabled usage metrics for content creators. (I think this is under the admin portal under tenant settings)
As I noted a problem with the second prerequisite, the company doesn’t want me to have access to edit a production workspace, because they don’t want developers having access due to issues around audit and separation of duties. Us, as the Business Intelligence department are responsible for reporting up to management on Power BI usage, but we cannot create or customize these reports. On the other side, the team that handles the deployments doesn’t do any development, so to have them create and support the reports would contradict the policy.
Has anyone dealt with this within their organization in regards to Power BI data governance and policy. Is there any solution or recommendation you could offer? I don’t know if there are any legal requirements, this is a publicly owned US business. It might be more company policy. If that is true, I would wonder if there are cases for exceptions, or limiting access to view only through settings, using separate user accounts, or to work off a shared dataset once the usage metrics are run for the first time.
Our goal is to ultimately publish them to the Business Intelligence Workspace and App as part of our BI dashboard. We are still developing our data governance plan, so if the trouble is an existing policy, is it possible to adopt a new one?
@ibesmond ,
I can only comment on a portion of your post. My company has one division that uses the Power BI service, and we only have Power BI Pro licensing (I use Power BI Report Server on-prem for all other reporting). I built one report for that division, which is based on Dynamics data, and had to figure out the whole service configuration to get everything to work.
When I first accessed the Usage data for the report I built using the ellipsis menu within the report (menu item reads “Open usage metrics”), a new report had to be built, which was done automatically by the service. I believe that is why Edit permissions are needed. After that, the service is supposed to automatically refresh the underlying dataset.
So basically, someone needs the ability to create the Usage report, assuming that the “canned” version is what you need as a source for your BI dashboard. Given what I have heard about developer versus DBA policies in large companies, it does make sense that developers develop and administrators deploy. In your case, it sounds like the team that handles deployments has to be given the required permissions to create the Usage report for each deployed report.
This article from Microsoft talks about the creation of the Usage report and the underlying dataset. Critically, the article explains how to view the dataset under “Settings” and change the credentials. That means that once the initial usage report and dataset are created, you could have the credentials changed to allow read access by whoever needs it, which could then potentially allow the required pinning to a dashboard. It does seem to be per workspace.
I hope this info helps, at least with the mechanical piece. The legal/policy piece will then depend on what is needed to get things working mechanically, and who will do that.
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