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boble's avatar
boble
New Member
2 years ago
Solved

Managed indentity and Power BI

Hello,   We aim to ensure our reports are not user-dependent. That's why we're interested in using a managed identity to manage the connections to our data sources. However, we're struggling to fin...
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  • tackytechtom's avatar
    tackytechtom
    2 years ago

    Hi boble ,

     

    The idea is to refresh the token right before a semantic model refresh is triggered from the refreshes REST API.  It's almost like a Just-In-Time access control approach: Anytime you want to fetch data from your sources, grab an access token from Entra ID (former Azure Active Directory) and use it for authentication. Then trigger a semantic model refresh via the REST API to get the data into Power BI. If you are already using the refreshes API to trigger a refresh (from a Data Factory, PowerShell, Python Script etc.) you would just need to add that part of fetching a token and updating the semantic model credentials before.

     

    /Tom
    https://www.tackytech.blog/
    https://www.instagram.com/tackytechtom/

tackytechtom's avatar
tackytechtom
Most Valuable Professional
2 years ago

Hi boble ,

 

I interpret your query that you want to use Power BI's "managed identity" to login to your data sources in order to fetch the data from there. However, Power BI does not have its own managed identity. You could use Service Principals instead, though. For this, the Service Principal needs to take over / own the semantic model. Here a blog about this topic. It utilises an Azure DevOps Pipeline to do the job as part of an CICD process for an Azure SQL Database. But in the end it is just a PowerShell script that you can also run from other clients. 

 

Let me know, if this helps 🙂

 

/Tom
https://www.tackytech.blog/
https://www.instagram.com/tackytechtom/