Hello, Power BI admins!
We would like to announce some exciting enhancements that will help you more easily and effectively manage your Power BI tenant settings. On May 23rd 2023, we unveiled Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end unified SaaS analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that your organization needs under a single framework. With the introduction of Fabric, we centralized administration of these analytical capabilities in the Fabric Admin portal (previously known as the Power BI admin portal). With the advent of Fabric, we want to make it easier for you to manage the growing number of settings in the Admin Portal as new workloads onboard to the platform. To this end, we are implementing two important enhancements to help you identify newly-introduced tenant settings as well as programmatically manage the growing body of tenant settings.
What are tenant settings?
Tenant settings are the configuration options that apply to the whole Fabric tenant. They control various aspects of Fabric features and behaviors, such as security, data protection, licensing and more. You can view and modify tenant settings in the Fabric admin portal, under Tenant settings.
Introducing Visual Cue for New Tenant Settings
We are excited to announce the addition of this new feature for tenant admins. This feature enables admins to easily identify and manage newly-introduced tenant settings within the Admin Portal.Changes within the tenant settings page in the admin portal are tagged with a
New_Tenant_Setting_Notifications_and_GetTenantSettings_API icon to help admins discover new settings. In addition, a summary of all new settings will be available at the top of the page, providing direct links to the corresponding settings in the Admin Portal. These enhancements will enable you to stay informed as new settings are introduced, helping you to more effectively manage your Power BI tenant settings.Here is a screen capture of a tenant setting tagged with the new visual cue.
New_Tenant_Setting_Notifications_and_GetTenantSettings_API
Introducing the new GetTenantSettings Read API
This API enables Tenant Admins to conveniently access all tenant settings in a single call, helping you to monitor and automate your environments as you take on administration of new Fabric experiences in addition to Power BI.Why use an API to read tenant settings?
Fabric admins require access to tenant settings for multiple scenarios, including:
- Auditing and documenting the current Fabric configuration.
- Sharing Admin settings with non-Admin users.
- Comparing tenant settings across various environments (e.g., dev, test, prod),
- Tracking changes and maintaining a history of tenant settings.
- Automating and streamlining Fabric administration tasks.
How does the new API work?
The GetTenantSettings API returns all tenant settings in a single JSON response. You can use any HTTP client or tool to call the API, such as Postman, PowerShell, or curl. You can also use the Power BI .NET SDK to call the API from your .NET applications.
To call the API, you need to have administrator rights (such as Office 365 Global Administrator or Power BI Administrator) or authenticate using a service principal. You also need to have the Tenant.Read.All or Tenant.ReadWrite.All scope.
The API endpoint is:
https://api.powerbi.com/v1/admin/tenantsettings
The API response is a JSON object that contains a list of tenant settings, each with a name, value, and description. For example:
{
"tenantSettings": [
{
"settingName": "Printing",
"title": "Print dashboards and reports",
"enabled": true,
"canSpecifySecurityGroups": true,
"enabledSecurityGroups": [
{
"graphId": "b43118fd-a43e-4046-80c4-afbeb965852a",
"name": "DigitalTeam"
}
],
"tenantSettingGroup": "Export and sharing settings"
},
{
"settingName": "CertifyDatasets",
"title": "Certification",
"enabled": false,
"canSpecifySecurityGroups": true,
"tenantSettingGroup": "Export and sharing settings",
"properties": [
{
"name": "CertificationDocumentationUrl",
"type": "Url",
"value": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US"
}
]
}
]
}
You can use any JSON parser or tool to process the response and extract the information you need. For example, you can use PowerShell to convert the JSON response to a CSV file and then import it into Excel for further analysis.
What are some use cases for the new API?
Here are some examples of how you can use the new API to enhance your Power BI administration experience:
- Create a Power BI report that shows your current tenant settings and their values.
- Create a PowerShell script that exports your tenant settings to a CSV file and uploads it to SharePoint or OneDrive.
- Create an Azure Logic App that triggers an email notification whenever a change in a tenant setting is different from the standard values established by the organization.
- Create a .NET application that compares tenant settings across different environments and highlights any discrepancies.
You can find more details about the new API in the official documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/fabric/admin/tenants/get-tenant-settings
We hope you find these exciting enhancements useful and look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions. Please let us know what you think in the comments below or in the Power BI community forums.