Forum Discussion
Advocate IIOwnership of Semantic Models
Is it possible for a service principal account to have ownership of all the semantic models in an organisation rather than a service account ?
thanks
Scott
A service principal cannot automatically become the owner of all semantic models across the entire organisation in the way a traditional service account (user identity) can. Power BI treats ownership as a user-level property, and service principals are app-based identities rather than user identities, so they don’t inherently “own” content. However, a service principal can be granted access and admin-level permissions to semantic models if it's added as a workspace Admin or assigned via APIs or deployment pipelines. The practical approach is to use a service principal for automation and CI/CD access, while letting actual user identities remain as dataset owners, or programmatically reassign ownership per dataset if needed. In summary, a service principal can't blanket-own all semantic models, but it can be configured to manage and control them with the correct workspace and tenant permissions.
4 Replies
- ibarrau
Super User
Hi. Yes. You can take ownership of a semantic model with a service principal using Power Bi Rest API. This is the request:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/take-over-in-groupYou can help yourself with powershell cmdlets, or simplepbi (python lib) or just code the request.
I hope that helps
- Poojara_D12
A service principal cannot automatically become the owner of all semantic models across the entire organisation in the way a traditional service account (user identity) can. Power BI treats ownership as a user-level property, and service principals are app-based identities rather than user identities, so they don’t inherently “own” content. However, a service principal can be granted access and admin-level permissions to semantic models if it's added as a workspace Admin or assigned via APIs or deployment pipelines. The practical approach is to use a service principal for automation and CI/CD access, while letting actual user identities remain as dataset owners, or programmatically reassign ownership per dataset if needed. In summary, a service principal can't blanket-own all semantic models, but it can be configured to manage and control them with the correct workspace and tenant permissions.
v-ssriganeshCommunity Support
Hi PaisleyPrince,
Thank you for posting your query in the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum, and thanks to Poojara_D12 & ibarrau for sharing valuable insights.
Could you please confirm if your query has been resolved by the provided solutions? This would be helpful for other members who may encounter similar issues.
Thank you for being part of the Microsoft Fabric Community.
- v-ssriganesh
Hello PaisleyPrince,
We hope you're doing well. Could you please confirm whether your issue has been resolved or if you're still facing challenges? Your update will be valuable to the community and may assist others with similar concerns.
Thank you.
