Alteryx Connect and Power BI metadata

[apett]

I have used the PowerBI Alteryx Connect Loader to pull in information from our PowerBi workspace.  I am trying to understand what data should be available and/or collected when I run the loader. 

It is only showing the report name and no other information like data source. Is this by design?

Thanks

[JoeS]

Hi @apett 

Where is your data stored for the report?

[VitekZ]

Hello Apett, 

Alteryx Connect gives you all the information about workspaces, worbooks, dashboards and datasources. 

The workbook detail displays the lineage for you report including the datasource as displayed below..

Please note this all depends on:

a) The access rights of a user that you use to run your PowerBI Loader

b) Architecture of your report - For instance if you query your DB tables directly (not using the PowerBI dataset) then the source database tables will appear in the lineage once you run the loader for your source database (eg. MSSQL_Loader, Oracle_Loader etc.)

 

[apett]

We are using Odata with Power BI.  Would that cause the issue I am seeing?

[VitekZ]

Hello @apett ,

I am afraid that we don't support the metadata lineage for ODATA feeds as of now. However you still should be able to see the detail WORKBOOK -> DATASOURCE where relevant. 

[BenMoss]

Hi @VitekZ,

I have just utilized the PowerBI loader version 2021.4 and am not seeing lineage between my reports and the appropriate PowerBI dataset.

In this version I am seeing The Power BI report display lineage with the underlying SQL tables, but not with the Power BI dataset as an intermediary.

As a result of this I then have a very lonely Power BI dataset which though displays refresh history seems to have no connection with the appropriate report or the underlying datasources that were used to create this dataset.

What could be causing this issue, or is this now like this design? I believe the lineage for Connect should be visually comparable with the lineage created by Power BI Online, that is 'Report' > 'Dataset' > 'Source Datasets (i.e. files or database tables)'.

Also tagging @PetrH @VojtechT 

Thanks in advance
Ben

[PetrT]

Hi @BenMoss, couple years ago (2020) Microsoft changed the way how they handle metadata. The DataMashup file we were relying on in PowerBI loader has been decommissioned. As of version 2021.4 we started to also use the Scanner API to harvest lineage metadata. For old reports created before that change on Microsoft side we still use DataMashup file and for newer reports we can only rely on data coming from the Scanner API.

So, it depends on when and how your report/dataset has been created and how your Scans are scheduled to run. Would you please mind sharing more details?

[BenMoss]

Hi @PetrT,

Yes we are utilizing the 2021.4 loader (and as a result the scanner API logic) in order to retrieve the data. However the information still provides detail on the link between the (Power BI) datasets and their reports, so I don't see why this link isn't being retained within Alteryx Connect.

Ben

[BenMoss]

@PetrT have you had a chance to look/think about this?

Providing an example snapshot of the 'PBI_REPORTS' table within our H2 database which clearly demonstrates that the Power BI loader is correctly fetching information about relationships between Power BI datasets and reports.

Just to clarify what the questions are...

Why is their no lineage between a PowerBI dataset and a report?

Why is the database connection linked directly to the Power BI report and not the dataset that the report is built off?

The below image indicates how lineage is visualised within Power BI, that is Power BI Report > Power BI Dataset > Actual Data Sources (files/DB tables and the like). This is what I envisage Alteryx Connect would look like, and the image shared in this post suggest this at one point was the case.