Expose Power BI App Audience Membership via REST API

Power BI App audiences are a key access management feature, yet audience membership cannot be retrieved through the REST API. This limits governance, auditing, and automated access review capabilities.

Problem

Power BI App audiences are widely used to manage access to reports and dashboards across organisations. However, audience membership can currently only be reviewed through the Power BI Service user interface.

This creates challenges for report owners, workspace administrators and governance teams who need to perform regular access reviews.

For organisations with many apps and audiences, reviewing access requires manually navigating through each app and audience configuration, making periodic reviews time-consuming and difficult to evidence.

Proposed Enhancement

Provide REST API support for retrieving Power BI App audience configuration and membership, including:

• App details

• Audience names

• Assigned users

• Assigned security groups

• Assigned Microsoft 365 groups

• Effective audience permissions and visibility settings

Business Value

Improved Governance

Supports periodic access reviews by allowing organisations to generate consolidated reports of who has access to Power BI Apps.

Compliance and Audit

Many organisations are required to regularly review user access to business-critical reporting platforms. API access would enable automated evidence collection for audit and compliance processes.

Operational Efficiency

Reduces the need for manual review through the Power BI Service and enables self-service reporting for app owners.

Better Adoption of App Audiences

App audiences are a recommended way of managing report access at scale. Providing API visibility would increase confidence in using audiences as a governance mechanism.

Example Use Cases

• Quarterly access certification exercises

• Internal and external audit requests

• Governance dashboards showing who can access which business reports

• Identification of stale or over-permissioned audiences

• Automated notifications to app owners for access reviews

Additional Consideration

Ideally, the API would also support retrieving effective membership where Entra ID groups are assigned, enabling a complete view of report access without requiring manual investigation across multiple systems.