Troubleshooting

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

For general recommendations on troubleshooting OCF connectors, refer to Troubleshooting.

Find specific troubleshooting scenarios below:

• Missing Workspaces

• Missing Power BI Report Fields

• Missing Tiles

• Cross-System Lineage Is Not Displayed

• Existing Tables Appear as TMP Objects in Lineage

• Columns Do Not Appear in the Dropdown for a Dataset or Dataflow in Lineage

• Missing Columns in Lineage after Selective MDE

• Column Level Lineage Appears Even After Disabling

• Error While Running MDE Queries

• Connectivity Issue Between Alation and Azure PowerBI

Missing Workspaces

Problem

Workspaces which are already extracted in Alation are not visible after upgrading to PowerBI OCF Connector version 2.2.4.

Solution

The issue is due to missing workspaces that are inaccessible by the service principal configured in the Connector Settings tab but extracted using the Admin API in earlier connector versions. You must provide the service principal access to the workspace in the PowerBI tenant. Once you give access, rerun the metadata extraction in Alation to restore the workspaces with their curation data.

If there are multiple workspaces to which you must add the service principal, you can bulk update the access for these workspaces using the following steps :

1. Navigate to ‘Workspaces’ under the Admin Portal settings.

2. To perform bulk selection of workspaces, click on the down arrow next to Name and select Text filters.

   

3. Set the filters and select the required workspaces and click Access. A dialog box appears.

4. Add the required Service Principal and click Save.

   

Note

1. You can update upto a maximum of 100 workspaces at a time using the above steps. Refer to similar article from Azure PowerBI - https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-au/blog/bulk-operations-in-the-admin-portal/

2. Access can be bulk updated using the above method only for supported workspace types. Legacy workspaces of type Group or PersonalGroup do not support editing of access permissions, recovery operations, or restore operations. Therefore, it is not possible to edit access for such workspaces. The filter Type = Workspace ensures that only modern workspaces are displayed.

Missing Power BI Report Fields

Problem

Report fields are only partially extracted. The logs show an API limit exceeded error with the 429 response code for the PBIX Download API. The message in the logs is similar to the following:

{"timeMillis":1711699692373,"thread":"grpc-default-executor
0","level":"WARN","loggerName":"org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate","message":"GET request for \"https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg
groups/c87a7b55-08f2-4565-84b8-e717263c7741/reports/09b2a05b-c8fc-4edc-80ba-43369b897565/Export\" resulted in 429 (null); invoking error
handler","endOfBatch":false,"loggerFqcn":"org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Log4JLogger","contextMap":{},"threadId":17,"threadPriority":5,"source
:{"class":"org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate","method":"handleResponseError","file":"RestTemplate.java","line":559,"classLoaderName":
app"},"timestamp":"2024-03-29T08:08:12.373+0000"}

Solution

The issue is caused by Power BI REST API throttling. You may have to reach out to the Azure Power BI Support team about increasing the REST API limit for your Power BI server.

Missing Tiles

Problem

Some of the tiles under the dashboard are not cataloged.

Solution

If a tile has no title, Alation skips cataloging it. Ensure that tiles have titles in Power BI.

Cross-System Lineage Is Not Displayed

Problem

Cross-system lineage has been is configured on a data source, but the lineage chart does not display upstream lineage.

Solution

Verify the following:

• Make sure that the data source on which the cross-system lineage is configured is supported by this connector. See the Expressions Supported by Lineage section in Configure Lineage.for the data sources supported by this connector.

• Make sure that the value in the BI Connection Info (Additional datasource connections) field uses the format host:port.

• Make sure that the connection details in the Azure Power BI Scanner connector and the data source are in the same format: catalog.schema.tablename or schema.tablename.

  

Existing Tables Appear as TMP Objects in Lineage

Problem

Tables on lineage charts appear as TMP objects when a schema’s name includes the period symbol.

Cause

The issue is due to a limitation in Alation’s framework, where the convention for schema names is not to include periods and to follow the format catalogName.schemaName.tableName. If a schema name includes periods, Alation can’t differentiate between schemaName and tableName.

Solution

This is a known issue.

Columns Do Not Appear in the Dropdown for a Dataset or Dataflow in Lineage

Problem

Columns don’t appear in the dropdown for a dataset or a dataflow node on the lineage chart.

Cause

Columns are displayed on lineage charts only if the connector has extracted enough metadata to establish a relationship between a Power BI report field and the Power BI dataset field from which it is created. The mapping between fields is done internally in the connector code but is dependent on the PBIX report export and parsing. For example, if Alation failed to download a Power BI PBIX report due to some limitation, such as, for example, the 429 throttling error, the connector won’t be able to extract report fields and display column-level lineage.

Solution

Check the connector logs for errors while extracting and downloading reports. The logs will point to the specific cause of the issue.

Missing Columns in Lineage after Selective MDE

Problem

Lineage is not displayed for some reports after selective extraction (MDE). However, all lineage is displayed after full MDE.

Solution

The report that doesn’t have lineage after selective MDE may have been created from a dataset or dataflow in a different workspace. For cross-workspace lineage to work, we need to catalog all the workspaces where the datasets populating the reports are located. Ensure that you select all relevant workspaces when configuring selective extraction.

Column Level Lineage Appears Even After Disabling

Problem

If you have enabled report fields extraction and ran extraction with Column Level Lineage enabled from feature configuration and later turned off these settings due to increased extraction time. You will observe that the columns remain in the lineage graph even after re-running the extraction.

Solution

This is a known issue.

Error While Running MDE Queries

Problem

You try to run the MDE queries using Postman and receive an unauthorized error message even after verifying all the permissions specified in the Azure Power BI OCF connector document.

Solution

Add TenantRead.All to the security group.

Connectivity Issue Between Alation and Azure PowerBI

Problem

Unable to establish connection to Azure PowerBI. The issue is observed between Azure Power BI and any Alation deployment models - Alation Cloud Service, Alation Agent, or Alation on-premise instances.

Cause

Restricted access to Power BI URLs.

Solution

Add the following additional URLs into the firewall’s allow list.

Purpose	Destination	Port
PowerBI APIs URL	api.powerbi.com	TCP 443
Access token URL	login.microsoftonline.com	TCP 443
PowerBI resource URL	*.analysis.windows.net	TCP 443

Wildcard (*) represents all levels under the root domain.

For more information, see the Add Power BI URLs to your allowlist.