Configure Microsoft Power BI as a Source

Overview

This article explains how to configure Microsoft Power BI as a source in DvSum Data Catalog (DC). To follow along you'll need a login to DvSum and connection credentials to Power BI which allow read access to the data source. You'll need to know a Client ID, Client Secret, and Tenant ID for your Power BI account.

Power BI is an interactive data visualization software product developed by Microsoft for business intelligence. DvSum uses it as a source in the Data Catalog. It can scan reports and data sets, making them available to data governance teams for curation, documentation, and tracking the lineage from data sources used to populate the Power BI assets.

Detailed Steps

0. Confirm availability of Datasets and Reports

Log in to the Power BI account. Some Datasets and Reports should be available based on user permissions. The screenshot below shows 7 Reports and 4 Data sets in our Power BI account.

1. Add Source

Log into DvSum Data Catalog (DC). Navigate to Administration → Data Sources → Add Source.

A dialog box will open. Select the Power BI source, provide a source name, and save it.

2. Configure Connection

Once a new Power BI source is created, you will be redirected to the connection settings detail page of the new source. In the Credentials section in Connection settings, enter these three properties:

• Client ID
• Client Secret
• Tenant ID

After entering the credentials, authenticate the source. 

Once the source is Authenticated, a "Workspaces" section will appear below the Authenticate button. You now have an option of limiting the scan to some specific Workspace(s) or we can scan all of them.

If "Limit to specific workspaces" is checked, the workspaces will be listed in the “Available Workspaces” tab. Select workspaces that are to be scanned, and move them to the “Selected Schemas” tab.

3. Save the Connection

To save, scroll up to the top. From the top right corner click on the “Done” button.

After that click the “Save” button. The source will get saved successfully.

4. Scan the data source

Navigate to Scan History Page and click the "Scan Now" button. When the scan completes, the status will change to "Completed".

After the scan completes, click on Scan Name and it will open the Scan Summary page of this scan.

The Scan Summary page displays all the insights of the scan. It indicates how many new workbooks and datasets were found in the scan. In the screenshot below it shows that 9 Reports and 5 Datasets were found.

Your Power BI connection is now fully configured and functional.

Browsing the Data Catalog

Datasets

Now let’s analyze the Reports and Data Sets that we got from this scan. Navigate to the Analytics Dictionary on the left sidebar. You will be redirected to the Analytics dictionary listing page which lists all the Reports and Data Sets. From there go to "Recently Refreshed" tab and can select the Reports and Data Sets that we have got in the recent scan.

Reports

From the listing select some recently scanned Report and the user will be redirected to the detail page of the Report. The screenshot below shows how the Reports detail page looks like.

On the detail page, a description of the report is fetched from the Power BI report. This means this report has the same description in Power BI and the same description is fetched and shows up here. The author of the report is basically the person who created this report in Power BI so this value is also basically fetched. Further, we have a lineage of the Report which actually shows us that the current Report is derived from which data set and which tables are connected to that data set.

Data Sets

From the listing select some recently scanned Data Set and the user will be redirected to the detail page of that Data Set. In the detail page Overview tab, Description and Author are fetched from the Power BI data sets, working the same as it was working for Reports. In the Data tab, we can see the Profiling Info and Field Summary. It contains field counts which are further divided into categories. In the field view section below we can see that the Data Sources fields and Data Connection fields are all fetched from the Power BI data which also has matched up entities.

Watch this quick video tutorial on how to add and configure a Power BI source into DvSum app.

Additional Resources

Read more about DvSum Web Service (Cloud SAWS)

Read more about DvSum Edge Gateway (On-Premises SAWS)