how to get data about users from powerbi rest api without been administrator

Hi Toi69___ 

You're attempting to access Power BI activity events or audit logs using the Power BI REST API or Microsoft Graph API by leveraging an Azure AD app registration with a service principal and secret. You've correctly assigned both delegated and application-level permissions such as AuditLog.Read.All, Directory.Read.All, Report.Read.All, and Tenant.Read.All, which are required to query audit and activity data. However, despite this setup, you're encountering errors when trying to retrieve the activity data, and the key limitation here is that you do not hold an administrator role in your tenant.

This is important because accessing audit logs—whether through the Power BI REST API (GetActivityEvents) or Microsoft Graph API (/auditLogs)—requires elevated privileges that only users in certain administrative roles can exercise. Specifically, you need to be assigned a role such as Global Administrator, Compliance Administrator, Security Administrator, or Report Reader with audit log access. Without this, even though your app technically has the required API permissions, the underlying user context or service principal identity is not authorized to access tenant-level audit data.

In summary, the error you’re facing is due to insufficient directory-level permissions tied to your role, not just the API permissions in Azure. To resolve this, you’ll need to request that a tenant administrator either:

Assign you an appropriate admin role (like Compliance Admin), or

Set up a separate service principal account with the required role and permissions, and use that identity for your API calls.

Without admin role privileges, Microsoft blocks access to sensitive logs for security and compliance reasons, regardless of the app permissions granted in Azure AD.