Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

To get the enhanced connector for Power BI on-prem, contact the Forward Deployed Engineering team at Alation.

This connector should be used to catalog On-Premise Power BI Report Server as a Business Intelligence source in Alation. The connector catalogs Power BI objects such as Servers, Folders, PowerBI Reports (PBIX), Reports, Data Sources, and Data Sets. It enables end-users to search and find Power BI objects from the Alation user interface.

Important: This connector supports only Power BI On-Premise / self-managed instances (not cloud-based PowerBI Service)

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

  • Configures connector settings

  • Configures Kerberos/NTLM/Basic Authentication

• Power BI Administrator:

  • Provides access to Power BI objects.

Scope

The table below shows the features supported by the connector.

Feature	Scope	Availability
Power BI Instance	Catalog Power BI instance in an On-Premise Environment	Yes
Folders	Catalog Folders in Power BI	Yes
Folder Description	Extract Description of a Folder	Yes
Filter Folders	Ability to include or exclude specific Folders	Yes
Reports	Catalog reports in Folders	Yes
Report Objects	Catalog report objects such as 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 the report objects	Yes
Report object lineage	Catalog the lineage of a report object	Yes
Filter Reports	Ability to include or exclude specific Reports	No
Report Owner	Owners or Authors who created a report	Yes
Auto-generated report object titles	Ability to capture auto-generated report object titles by Power BI	Yes
PowerBI Reports (PBIX)	Catalog PowerBI Reports (PBIX) in a Folder	Yes
PowerBI Reports (PBIX) object Measures & Dimensions	Catalog dimensions and measure of a PBIX object	Yes
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
Table level Lineage	Report Table lineage to the data source	Yes (not available for PBIX report types)
Column Level Lineage	PBIX and Report Column lineage to the data source	No **
SQL query from dataset used to build report	Extraction of the SQL query from datasource	Yes (not available for PBIX report types)
PowerBI object owner and last modified	Catalog the Owner of the PowerBI object and the last modified date	Yes
Authentication	NTLM, Basic, Kerberos	Yes
Link to PowerBI object from Alation	Ability to open the PowerBI object from Alation	Yes

* - 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 this 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	Swagger Documentation	Description
Swagger	https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/microsoft-rs/PBIRS/2.0#/	The Power BI Report Server REST API provides programmatic access to the report server catalog.