Forum Discussion
Using a Dataflow connector with different credentials
Hi everyone, so Microsoft support have come back and have basically said that in order to do this, I either need to use an on-prem gateway .... for an Azure source... I'm not sure they fully understood the ticket, but ok.
OR use the Dataflow Gen 2 instead of Gen 1. I don't have a license for the Gen 2, so that isn't going to work for me and I don't know if I'll be able to get the company to pay for it.
I have been looking at the composite models and I may have a way around it with multiple semantic models - one model for each tenant, and then combining those potentially. It won't be a 'clean' way of doing it, but I think it might just work - because I can set the credentials for each semantic model using the method GilbertQ mentioned above - creating the creds first.
Hi zantarel
You're not alone in facing this limitation—many users encounter the same issue when trying to pull data from multiple Azure Tenants using the Azure Resource Graph (ARG) connector in Power BI. The root of the problem is that the ARG connector maintains a single global credential binding per user across all workspaces, which means any time you update the credentials for one dataflow, it affects all others using the same connector—even if they're in different workspaces. This behavior makes it impossible to maintain separate ARG dataflows for each tenant when different credentials are required. As a result, most organizations avoid using the ARG connector directly in Power BI for multi-tenant setups. Instead, they typically handle this by using Azure Functions, Logic Apps, or Azure Data Factory to authenticate into each tenant using dedicated service principals, perform the ARG queries externally, and store the results in a centralized location like Azure Data Lake or Blob Storage. Power BI then connects to this central repository to retrieve data. Alternatively, some use PowerShell scripts or custom APIs to manage tenant-level data collection and consolidate the results for reporting. These approaches decouple authentication and data retrieval from Power BI, providing more control and scalability in multi-tenant scenarios.
Hey, ok so that's interesting. I was thinking about using a custom API to be honest. However, I had another thought yesterday, which was as I'm using a service account per tenant, I could get other people in my team to create a dataflow for the other tenants - not ideal, but manageable - as long as we don't have more tenants than people in the team!! However, when I got my colleague to do this, the dataflow he created, with the other credentials overwrote my credentials. So it's not per user. I don't know what it is at this point. But it seems wild to me that someone else can create a dataflow and overwrite my credentials in my dataflow?!
Any recommendations on blogs/videos of people who have created custom APIs for the tenant info? I'm not great at APIs!!