The Scanner API is part of the Power BI admin API. It enables administrators to efficiently and automatically retrieve valuable information about their organization's Power BI assets, such as inventory, metadata, and lineage. In turn, they can leverage this information for their own custom-made solutions.
The API was developed with the aim of improving the efficiency and performance of the Power BI scan so that it could support large numbers of data assets while still conforming to the security practices of organizations. The scanner supports service principal authentication and incremental scanning, and returns metadata such as endorsement status, sensitivity label, etc.
The Scanner API reached GA over a year ago, and a growing number of organizations now actively use it to better understand their products and to get information that helps them achieve their governance goals.
To further meet your needs and follow up on your requests, we’ve added several new capabilities over the past few months. We now also support:
Artifact metadata
Scheduled refresh settings for Power BI models (dataset, dataflow, datamart)
RDL data source properties:
relations
datasourceUsages
Dataset sub-artifact metadata content
Sub-artifact metadata for dataset tables whose Enable load property is set to OFF, and values of parameters that were defined in the pbix file. (under expressions)
RLS configuration
Dataset sub-artifact coverage
We’ve expanded sub-artifact coverage in additional types of datasets. Until now, we only supported dataset sub-artifacts upon refresh, publish and republish.We now also support:
- XMLA changes
- Autogenerated datasets
- Datasets created via Quick create and Quick share
- Web modeling modifications
Datamarts
Datamarts are a relatively new type of artifact in Power BI. The Scanner API supports datamart metadata, including the datamart’s lineage relationships with other Power BI artifacts.