New user here - Data import in Power BI using Service account instead of name user

[ols]

Hi,

I am new to the community as well as new to the Power BI environment.

I need help understanding best practices for scheduling data imports to Power BI. In my case, we are bringing data from SAP BW on HANA.

Obviously, we want to control how many calls are made to the BW servers during a window of time, and we have some stories and dashboards that need to be available every day at the same time. 

We also don't want to use an Admin user or a collaborator user to schedule the loads because if those users leave, we will have failures everywhere, impacting our SLAs. 

I am wondering how other companies control this so we can plan ahead and avoid interruptions in the loads due to inactive users, as well as be able to monitor loads to ensure successful completion.

Thanks for the help!

Orlando

[collinq · Accepted solution]

HI @ols ,

The best bet on the userid is to create a Service Account with a permanent password that has the appriopiate permissions to the data and to Power BI and then you use that Service Account to run the queries.  That will resolve the inherent issues of using individual userids (ie. password changes, role changes, organizational departures, etc).

As for the number of calls made to the BW server, you can control that with the number of scheduled refreshes that you make in the Power BI service settings for that dataset.  Your license will determine just how many of those you can do a day but you can make it as few as once a day or perhaps set it for some strategic hours of the day or whatever you need so that you manage the data pull and the data need.  if once a day refresh is sufficient for your users, then only do once a day - no need for an hourly pull in that situation.

As for monitoring, when you schedule the refresh their is an option to send a notification on an error.  You can set that notification to key stakeholders so it won't be missed.

[collinq · Accepted solution]

HI @ols ,

The best bet on the userid is to create a Service Account with a permanent password that has the appriopiate permissions to the data and to Power BI and then you use that Service Account to run the queries.  That will resolve the inherent issues of using individual userids (ie. password changes, role changes, organizational departures, etc).

As for the number of calls made to the BW server, you can control that with the number of scheduled refreshes that you make in the Power BI service settings for that dataset.  Your license will determine just how many of those you can do a day but you can make it as few as once a day or perhaps set it for some strategic hours of the day or whatever you need so that you manage the data pull and the data need.  if once a day refresh is sufficient for your users, then only do once a day - no need for an hourly pull in that situation.

As for monitoring, when you schedule the refresh their is an option to send a notification on an error.  You can set that notification to key stakeholders so it won't be missed.

[ols · Accepted solution]

Thanks, @collinq , for our Public workspaces. We do only one load a day after the DW has completed the loads from the source systems. I appreciate your prompt and sound advice and will work with the team to implement your approach.

I believe some other users do refreshes every hour for some RT dashboards in our Distribution Centers, but those are less usual and are part of our Departmental Workspaces.

Thanks!

Orlando