Issue while connecting power bi desktop to azure analysis service

[Shreya]

Hi Everyone,

We have an azure analysis service instance. We are trying to connect to this service using Power BI Desktop using abc.xyc@xxx.com. On some machines, we are able to access using this user id but on a few machines, we are unable to connect using this id. The issue that Power BI desktop says is that the user doesn't have access to the model. This issue is resolved only when the user's individual email id is made the administrator. 

Please let me know if anyone has faced similar issue and been able to solve it.

Thanks and Regards,

Shreya Kaushik

[Anonymous]

@Shreya,

When connecting to Azure Analysis Service in Power BI Desktop, the user requires to be Azure Analysis Services administrator.



Regards,
Lydia

[Shreya]

Hi Lydia,

Thanks for your response! 

In the solution that we are trying to develop we dont want to give each of our users' AD user access to AAS, instead we have created two users specifically for AAS, one which has admin access (lets call it admin@xxx.com), the other which has read access (lets call it read@xxx.com). The problem is that on some machines/laptops, power bi desktop is able to connect to AAS using read@xxx.com, but on some machines, unless we add the user's AD user as an administrator to the AAS instance, it doesn't connect.

[Anonymous]

@Shreya,

In these problem machines, are you able to use the account to connect to Azure Analysis Service using other tools such as SSMS or SSDT?

Do you use same connection mode and input database name in Power BI Desktop of different machines?

Regards,
Lydia

[Shreya]

Hi @Anonymous,

We tried the following steps:

1. SSMS - We connected using the admin user and it was successful.
2. Excel - We created an odc file on a computer that was able to connect to AAS, and used this ODC file to connect excel to the AAS from one of the problematic machines. Using this approach, the excel sheet connected to AAS.
3. Power BI - Trying to connect to AAS directly didn't work on several machines. However, when we use the "runas" command and use the admin or the read user then we are able to connect Power BI to AAS.

We have observed that Power BI prompts for user name/password only the first ever time anyone uses it on their machine.

In all the subsequent connections and tries, it uses the same user name and password.

We tried to clear permissions on the options and settings dialog, we also tried to edit permissions in the data source settings tab, but none of this helped.

Hence, the only machines that do not have any issues in connecting Power BI to AAS using the admin/read user are the ones on which the admin/read user was used the first ever time. 

Is this a bug in the Azure Analysis Services Databases Connector in Power BI?

Thanks and Regards,

Shreya Kaushik