Troubleshooting¶
Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation
Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation
Untitled Reports¶
Issue: Reports are cataloged in Alation as Untitled.
Resolution: Edit the specific report visual in Power BI Desktop, make sure the Title bar is enabled, and provide a title for the visual. Publish the report.
Lineage Not As Expected¶
Issue: Lineage is missing or displayed incorrectly.
Resolution:
Ensure the Power BI report was created with data from an official, managed data source. If data was pasted into the report, or imported from a csv file by the user then lineage cannot be generated.
Avoid renaming objects and data sources.
Connector Limitations¶
- The On-Premise Power BI Connector extracts the measures and dimensions of a Power BI Report by exporting the PBIX file. There are some limitations to this export functionality from Microsoft. The main limitations are summarized here:
If the administrator has turned off the ability to download data, the connector cannot download reports.
PBIX files with data sources also cataloged in Alation should work if the PBIX connection string is correct and matches the cataloged data source FQDN. However PBIX files are not always created with PowerBI registered data sources or data sets. Due to the nature of how PBIX files are created with PowerBI desktop then imported to a PowerBI Report Server, some PBIX files may not have well formatted connection strings, or the PBIX may have locally imported data (example: csv files) which have no explicit lineage paths to sources, or the PBIX file may have Copy/Pasted data. The connection string, tables, and fields will be extracted and present in the Alation catalog, but unless the data source is also cataloged in Alation using the same FQDN as in the PBIX file, then no automatic lineage can be generated.