Brunner_BI

24. Aug. 20231 Min.

Limitations of the Power BI lineage view or impact analysis

I recently saw that the lineage view / impact analysis in the Power BI Service shows this when a shared dataset is selected.

Both views, the one by item (left) and the one by workspace (right) list a number of reports.

At the bottom is the really interesting thing though, it says there are more items (or more workspaces for the screenshot on the right) with limited access.

I am a tenant admin in my org but I still don't see everything due to "privacy reasons", Microsoft argues (see screenshot below).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/governance/impact-analysis#impact-analysis-pane

Now that might be the way Power BI works (access by workspace, even for tenant admins there is no superaccess by default etc.) or they actually see problems if I could see everything.

But I just do not get a complete lineage view of the whole tenant here.

And I would argue that this is a major limitation, because I need to do my own coding, running some scripts or using a third-party software to get a full picture here.

I only became aware of this whole issue at a user group presentation, where I was showing our external tool "Measure Killer". In MKs admin mode, we run Scanner/Admin API calls to find all reports connected to a dataset in the whole tenant.

Then I compared this to the Power BI impact analysis and we saw what the problem was.

What are your thoughts on this?

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