Forum Discussion
Unauthorized 401 when accessing Power BI Admin API
Hi novirae ,
According to the error message, 401 Unauthorized error usually indicates a problem with authentication or permissions, you can check if the tenant settings are turned on in the following official documentation:
Admin API admin settings - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
This is the related document, you can view this content:
Solved: Power Bi REST API - 401 Authorization error when u... - Microsoft Fabric Community
Troubleshoot Power BI REST APIs - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Solved: Power Bi REST API - 401 Authorization error when u... - Microsoft Fabric Community
Best Regards,
Liu Yang
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Hey SethParker,
No. We weren't able to get past it at least in a way I'd love to. After some later testing, discussions, posting on different sites I came to a conclusion that this is indeed a bug / not implemented feature for multiple reasons (maybe including security?)
What seemed to be working was generating REST API token using grant_type = password instead of client_credentials, but that forces you to specify Entra ID username/password (and that username ideally wouldn't have MFA enabled, which is a very strict no-go for us).
We ended up with named (per user) administrative-like account that has MFA enabled and we use that in Powershell script (using Connect-PowerBIServiceAccount) to assign access to workspaces.
After that we use the App Registration to do administrative tasks like removing old reports / archiving them to Blob Storage etc. that can be done per workspace level
Thank you for your response! I agree that this seems to be a bug. We are trying to query Activity History (and a couple of other tables) from the Admin API, so I don't know of another way to get to that data with an App Registration. A non-MFA user with access to the Admin API is a non-starter for us as well. Thanks again!
You shouldn't have any issue querying read only APIs (like activity history, list of workspaces / datasets / reports) etc - we have entire monitoring solution based on that data that are getting retrieved by service principal/app registration. The only thing we weren't able to get working is using POST requests (like add access to workspace) via App Registration - rest works perfectly fine