Power BI architecture - lifecycle reports - versioning, roles, licences - getting started

[Anonymous]

I am a bit confused about the many options and still miss some things. I have found some options to bypass or achieve certain things, but I have problem to use or decide the right required components.

We are unsure alone if we really need PPU:
- Model size limit: still unsure if we really reach the limit. What happens when you reach it? Just slower or really blocked/not usable anymore? Currently it is about 600 MB, but that may increase quickly.
- Refresh: we haven't decided yet if we need incremental or full
- Pipelines: do we need these for our use case, unsure?

Understood:
- Power BI Workspace PPU: only PPU user can access the report, Pro user cannot.
- Power BI App: Pro user can also access the report from the PPU Workspace.
So I need the app to save license costs for viewers?

Use Case:
- inital report is provided
- this report may be customized and published again by selected users (key user) (report file, design)

- but this file mus also be update for new dataset changes by developers
- this report should be allowed to be used as a template for new reports: for personal and/or for publishing
- wrong changes must be undone, a change in the report file should be visible among the keyusers

How do i manage the lifecycle and versioning for:
- report files vs. datasets/dataflows
How do i manage the datasets/dataflows? Should i hide them in a different workspace and share to others?
How do I manage workspaces vs apps?
How do I manage environments: test vs prod (for datasets relevant)?
I think report files and datasets should have different lifecycles?

I see there are pipelines for workspaces. But they are not necessarily useful for my use case? I am not sure if a key-user understands that he can only edit the report in Test or I am thinking about not allowing this in the Prod Workspace. Idea: Test and Prod Workspace, Prod (only read, but can then the pipeline run?) other permission like Test-Env. Only in Test you are allowed to edit and then you have to publish via pipeline. But the pipeline is referenced to Workspace. Does it also pull apps with it?

I have also seen solutions with OneDrive for versioning report files, but I don't like this solution because of the amount of data we load.

Are there best practices for navigation: Solve it via apps or design it into the report page?

And also not sure if we need or should apply dataflows?

And then I saw that there are also workspaces in Azure? These are completely different?

Is there a big picture somewhere, a wizzard, better guidelines to design the architecture for editing and publishing report files with different environments (test, prod)?

It's all so time consuming (try the different roles, licences, components) and so confusing, and it's hard to make decisions.

[Burningsuit]

Hi @Anonymous 

Phew, that's a lot of questions! Implementing Power BI is a Big Deal, especially so if you're going to have a lot of users, you are quite correct in looking to understand the many options before implementing them.

Firstly, I must point out one misconception in your understandings. Apps built from a PPU workspace require the Users of those Apps to have a PPU licence. You can't consume an App that comes from a PPU workspace with a Pro licence.

That said, a lot of your questions depend upon the size of data and number of users you will have.

Dataset size. A Pro dataset can be a maximum size of 1GB, if it gets larger than that you will be unable to uploade (publish) it, or if you are doing automatic refreshing, refresh will fail. (and the data will be reverted to the last good refresh) .

Pipelines, A pipeline can be thought of as three connected PPU or Premium Capacity Workspaces, with one App as the output. Think of an App as a compiled set of visualisations that reference the Dataset in the Product Workspace. Access to all Workspaces can be controlled, if you are a large users base it works best to have few users accessing Workspaces, and the majority consuming via an App (You don't need access to the Workspace if you have access to the App).

With those basic points addressed, I think you will find much value in the Power BI guidance documentation: See Power BI guidance documentation - Power BI | Microsoft Learn and also in the blog of Matthew Roache  (A Microsoft PowerBI CAT team guru) 

See: Power BI guidance from the CAT – BI Polar (ssbipolar.com)

and also

Dataflows in Power BI – BI Polar (ssbipolar.com)  for more answers than I can give you here.

Fundamentally, a Pro licence is a monthly commitment, so if you start with Pro you can always upgrade to PPU later on and if you are eager to start trying things I'd reccomment getting a Pro licence and starting to use Power BI and experience its environment which may help your descisions.

Hope this helps

Stuart

[Anonymous]

I like the articles from https://radacad.com, because he is explaining technical backgrounds, this is important. The documentation from Microsoft is mixed and confusing.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your first help and clarification. My tests were wrong here. The documentation is misleading: "Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licenses to view your app." The user can see and use the app (because you can bundle content from Pro and PPU), but can not access the PPU content.