Azure Power BI OCF Connector (Legacy): Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Available from release 2020.4

The OCF connector for Azure Power BI was developed by Alation.

To download the Power BI OCF connector package, go to the Alation Connector Hub available from the Customer Portal. Go to Customer Portal > Connectors > Alation Connector Hub. Only Alation users with access to the Customer Portal can access the Alation Connector Hub. If you don’t have access to the Customer Portal, contact Alation Support.

This connector should be used to catalog Power BI as a Business Intelligence source in Alation. The connector catalogs Power BI objects such as Workspaces, Dashboards, and Reports. It enables end users to search and find Power BI objects from the Alation user interface.

Important

This connector supports only Power BI Cloud and does not support Power BI On-Premise instances.

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

  • Azure Administrator:

    • Creates an Application in Azure Cloud

    • Provisions Application ID, Tenant ID, and Secret Key

    • Grants consent to access Power BI APIs

  • Power BI Administrator:

    • Creates a Power BI service ID

    • Provides access to Power BI workspaces.

Scope

The table below shows what features are covered by the connector.

Feature

Scope

Availability

Power BI Instance

Catalog Power BI instance in an Azure Cloud Environment

Yes

Workspaces

Catalog workspaces in Power BI

Yes

Workspace Description

Extract Description of a workspace

No

Filter Workspaces

Ability to include or exclude specific workspaces

Yes

Reports

Catalog reports in a Workspace

Yes

Report Objects

Catalog report objects such as charts and 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 report objects

Yes

Report object lineage

Catalog the lineage of a report object

No**

Filter Reports

Ability to include or exclude specific Reports

No

Report Owner

Owners or Authors who created a report

No

Auto generated report object titles

Ability to capture auto generated report object titles by Power BI

No

Dashboards

Catalog dashboards in a workspace

Yes***

Dashboard object Measures & Dimensions

Catalog dimensions and measure of a dashboard object

No

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

* - 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 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:

../../../_images/PowerBI_05.png

Power BI APIs

The following table lists the Power BI APIs used by this connector to extract metadata from Power BI:

Type

API End Point

Description

Authentication

https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/token

Gets the access token for authentication

Workspace

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups

Gets workspaces

Reports

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports

Gets reports from a workspace

Report Pages

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports/{reportId}/pages

Gets pages from a report

Tiles

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/dashboards/{dashboardId}/tiles

Gets tiles from a report

Datasets

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/datasets

Gets datasets for a report

Data sources

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/datasets/{datasetId}/datasources

Gets data sources for each dataset

Dashboards

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/dashboards

Gets dashboards from a workspace