PowerBINotAuthorizedException exception when executing admin/activityevents API

Hi Guys

I wanted to share information about the automation of importing PowerBI audit logs using Application Permissions or Service Principle from PowerBI service right from App registration to using MSAL python library. There are several documentations available in Microsoft site with different configurations, but unless we search them with specific term and follow the instructions I was not able to resolve the authentication issues.

Since most of the company's we use multifactor authentication, delegated permissions will not allow any python/.net application to get automated. 

The first and foremost thing we need to perform is registering an app in Azure portal or using app registration using following link https://dev.powerbi.com/apps

App Registration:

Perform app registration steps only as mentioned in the following blog (https://carldesouza.com/how-to-register-an-azure-app-to-use-with-power-bi/) and DO NOT set any permissions. Since these permissions didn't worked while authenticating the token generated.

Permissions:

1. After assigning Tenant.Read.All make sure you are Not accepting the admin consent as suggested by below documentation.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/read-only-apis-service-principal-authentication

1. Create Client Secret and keep this handy.

Making API calls using MSAL library:

1. MSAL client secret example can be found here

https://github.com/AzureAD/microsoft-authentication-library-for-python/blob/dev/sample/confidential_client_secret_sample.py

1. Create json parameter file(Parameters.json) with following configurations and endpoints

{    "authority": "https://login.microsoftonline.com/Enter you tenantID Here ",

    "client_id": "Enter ClientID of the app you have Registered",

    "scope": ["https://analysis.windows.net/powerbi/api/.default"],

    "secret": "Enter Client Secret you created above",

    "endpoint": "https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/admin/groups?$expand=datasets,dataflows,reports,dashboards,users&$top=5000"

}

1. Install necessary MSAL library for Python using "pip install msal" in your command prompt
2. You can get the code I have used to generate user activity  data from below git link. Even though I have mentioned an endpoint in parameters file I am deriving my required user activity endpoint in Python program since I have to generate several extracts with several endpoints and I want to use a single parameter files for all those extracts.

Note: There might be better ways to program in Python to extract the data from these API's but this is what I have developed which is working successfully.