Data Lineage. can you connect up to the meta data

[DebbieE]

The Data Lineage is great,

Is the only way to look at it within Service,

We would really love to connect to this meta data so we can use it for our full Data Lineage which includes lots of other tools.

Can we connect to this meta data in some way so we can do more that just look at it in Service?

I know there are rest APIs to look at the Data flow, Dataset etc. But is there a REST API for access straight into Data Lineage

Similary we are looking at something that pulls out the M Code and DAX that sits behind these objects. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

HI @DebbieE,

Power bi rest API does not provide any functions to extract metadata, I'd like to suggest you submit an idea for your requirement.
Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[Anonymous]

HI @DebbieE,

Nope, current power bi rest api does not contain a function to access resource metadata.
In my opinion, I'd like to suggest you add a blank query table to extract other table structures and metadata then you can use rest API to export data from that table.

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[DebbieE]

I really dont understand what you mean? could you give a bit more info on how you would do this?

[Anonymous]

HI @DebbieE,

It means you can create a blank query table with metadata function to invoke other query tables to collect information then you do not need to do these on power bi service side.

Handling Schema 

In addition, you can also take a look at the following blog to add metadata to your source table or enabled the enhanced dataset metadata option:

Adding Metadata To A Report With Power Query 

Using enhanced dataset metadata (preview) 

Regards,
Xiaoxin Sheng

[DebbieE]

this is great. I will look at this. 

However its not what we want to do. We want to use the Meta data to create logic around the entire process meaning we want to take it and use it via an API within another service that looks after all out lineage processing. 

I dont think adding meta data to a report will help in this case?

[cvillegas]

@DebbieE @Anonymous A big warning on enabling the Enhanced Metadata. Read the bottom note because we enabled it at one point and noticed a big problem.

Lineage view
Datasets using the new metadata format currently don't show links to dataflows in the lineage view in the Power BI service.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

HI @DebbieE,

Power bi rest API does not provide any functions to extract metadata, I'd like to suggest you submit an idea for your requirement.
Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @DebbieE,

This won't be easy ..

The REST APIs / PowerShell cmdlets will get you up to the datasource level used in a report. It'll likely boil down to a combination of Get-Report, Get-Dataset, Get-Datasource, and then some things on the gateway to extract all the info you need into a bunch .csv, and go from there.

If you want to go deeper to a table/view level (for DB sources), there's no native options to be found. The only way you could go about doing it is by extracting the .pbix files, and start scraping/parsing the M Queries. I've not tried it, but I'm very certain it's a horrible job.

There's a vendor solution out there, Power BI Sentinel, that have mastered this. It might worth a shot to see if you can integrate this into your lineage solution. They have some other pretty impressive features as well, so it might suit you well.