SSRS report subscription fails due to owner

[micheledubose]

Hello,

I have a few subscriptions created in Power BI Report Server. These subscriptions were created by a user who is no longer with the company. As a result, the subscriptions failed. As the Admin of Power BI Report Server, I was able to change the owner to another user and ran the subscription successfully. It seems only an Admin can change the owner of an existing subscription. However, for new subscriptions, the Admin nor non-admins can change the owner.  Is there a way for non-admins to change the owner of an existing or new subscription? Is there a way for the Admin to change the owner of a new subscription?

[d_gosbell]

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@micheledubose wrote:

Is there a way for non-admins to change the owner of an existing or new subscription?

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You don't need to be full admin, you either need to be a Content Manager of the report or the folder the report is in. Or you need the manage all subscriptions privilege. If you connect via SQL Server Management Studio you can create a custom role with just this privilege and assign that role to people that you wish to be able to manage subscriptions for others.

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@micheledubose wrote:

Is there a way for the Admin to change the owner of a new subscription?

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I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. If you are asking if the admin can set a different default owner the answer is no, the person that creates the subscription is always set as the original owner.

[micheledubose]

Hi @d_gosbell ,

The non-admin users are assigned to a custom role which has the "Manage all subscriptions" privilege.  When those users attempt to change the default owner of an existing subscription, they get an error: "The permissions granted to user 'X' are insufficient for performing this operation."

As far as changing the default owner of a new subscription, if the person who creates the subscription is always the original owner, then I will always have this issue.  I would like the owner of a subscription to be a service account because that account never expires. So, if a user is no longer with the company, the subscription will not fail. 

[d_gosbell · Accepted solution]

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@micheledubose wrote:

Hi @d_gosbell ,

The non-admin users are assigned to a custom role which has the "Manage all subscriptions" privilege.  When those users attempt to change the default owner of an existing subscription, they get an error: "The permissions granted to user 'X' are insufficient for performing this operation."

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OK so maybe changing the owner is a special operation that only an admin can do

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@micheledubose wrote:

As far as changing the default owner of a new subscription, if the person who creates the subscription is always the original owner, then I will always have this issue.  I would like the owner of a subscription to be a service account because that account never expires. So, if a user is no longer with the company, the subscription will not fail. 

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Yes you will always have this issue. But this is a security feature so it is unlikely to be changed. This protects you from someone setting up a report subscription to send sensitive information outside the company that would keep working even after they have left the company. It is painful when genuine subscriptions get disabled, but as long as you are aware of this it can be managed and you can proactively set important subscriptions to run under a service account to prevent this. You just cannot set it as a default.

[micheledubose]

Hi @d_gosbell,

Is there a way to change the owner of multiple subscriptions to a service account without having to edit each indivdividual subscription?  In other words, is there a sql database table that I can run a query against that updates the owner field?

[d_gosbell]

This information probably is stored in a table somewhere, but the database schema is not documented and I have not experimented with changing subscription owners this way myself.

[micheledubose]

I've found that there's a Subscription table in the ReportServer database.  Is it recommended to change the owner by updated this table?

[d_gosbell]

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@micheledubose wrote:

I've found that there's a Subscription table in the ReportServer database.  Is it recommended to change the owner by updated this table?

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No, it is not recommended to change anything in the ReportServer database.

The recommended approach would be to use the REST API for subscriptions https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/microsoft-rs/pbirs/2.0#/Subscriptions/SetSubscription or you could use the ReportingServicesTools Powershell module (which is a wrapper around the REST API)

[micheledubose]

Can you point me to documenation for using the ReportingServicesTools Powershell module?

[d_gosbell]

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@micheledubose wrote:

Can you point me to documenation for using the ReportingServicesTools Powershell module?

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There is a little bit of documentation on their github page https://github.com/microsoft/ReportingServicesTools and you can also use the get-help cmdlet in powershell to access the builtin help for each cmdlet. I would suspect that you should be able to use a combination of Get-RsSubscription / Set-RsSubscription