Forum Discussion
Using Power BI APIs to get tenant overview
- 10 months ago
Hi FabScone75 ,
Below is an approach I’ve used in real tenants for “who’s doing what / where” and how I’d tweak your Bronze > Silver flow to make it more reliable and easier to report on later.
- Collect the right signals
- Use the Power BI Admin “scanner” APIs for workspace/artifact inventory and schema (Metadata scanning (Scanner API)). Prefer GetModifiedWorkspaces for incremental scans.
- Use Admin “activity events” for user actions (Get Activity Events) - this is the authoritative “who did what” source.
- Resolve users/licensing with Microsoft Graph (optional), e.g. Users. - Keep raw forever (cheap) and normalize early
- Keep your daily JSON in a date-path forever or compact to Parquet/Delta weekly.
- In Silver, don’t throw away change history. Maintain an SCD Type 2 history table and a dim_workspace_current view/table. - Use incremental + watermarking
- Stamp ingestion_date from the file path and use Dataflow incremental refresh.
- For scanner APIs, use GetModifiedWorkspaces with your last successful scan time. - Harden the pipeline
- Service principal auth; enable read-only admin APIs (Tenant settings).
- Implement retries/backoff for 429/5xx; store API run metadata. - Model for analytics
- Gold star schema: FactActivity plus DimUsers, DimWorkspaces, DimDatasets, DimReports for easy slicing.
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- Collect the right signals
Hi FabScone75
You are not using the right approach for Audit Log. Here I can see mess everywhere.
First thing first
1. Use Power BI Dataflow Gen 2 to land the data in SQL database.
2. Use Microsoft Purview for the unified audit log ( Before it was called Power BI Audit Log, now they are called Fabric Unified Audit Log in Microsoft Purview. You might need to contact your Fabric Admin for that. All activities are recorded "Who is doing what and which workspace are assigned..etc" in the Audit Log.