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vibhoray's avatar
vibhoray
New Member
8 months ago
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Daily refresh fail: employee leaves org

hello,    We are facing a situation where the owner of a Power BI semantic model has left the organization, and as a result, the scheduled daily refresh has stopped.   For context: There is no on...
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  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    7 months ago

    Thankyou, cengizhanarslan  and rohit1991  for your responses.

    Hi vibhoray 

    We appreciate your inquiry through the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.
    A service account is technically just another Entra ID (Azure AD) user account, but it is created for system use and not tied to any individual employee. Because it belongs to the organization and is managed by IT, the credentials and access remain stable even if employees leave. This makes it suitable for things like Power BI dataset refresh, since the authentication is not dependent on a specific user account that might get disabled later.

     

    Thank you

rohit1991's avatar
rohit1991
Icon for Super User rankSuper User
8 months ago

Hii vibhoray 

 

The refresh failed because the semantic model was using credentials tied to the original owner’s user account (OAuth). When that account is disabled after the employee leaves, Power BI can no longer authenticate to the data source, so scheduled refresh stops. The recommended long-term best practice is to configure the data source using a Service Principal (Azure AD App) or a dedicated service account, so authentication is not dependent on an individual user. This ensures the dataset refresh continues even if employees leave and aligns with Microsoft’s governance recommendations for enterprise environments.