PowerBI - Service Principal Deployment takes Ownership

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

we are deploying our PowerBI Reports / Datasets via DevOps and using a Service Principal. This works fine.

I am developing the reports locally with my personal organization account. We are connecting to an Azure SQL Database as a source in import mode.

Once I use the service principal for the deployment, the service principal takes ownership of the dataset i.e. I can't perform any refreshes as the service principal can't access the connection string information.

I receive "Scheduled refresh is disabled because at least one data source is missing credentials."

My idea was to use the same service principal to change the connection string in the dataset automatically after the deployment. Is there a nice way to do that ? I found this resource:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/setalldatasetconnections but it's deprecated.

[v-yiruan-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Please check if hit any following limitations when using Service Principal:

• Service principal only works with new workspaces.
• My Workspace isn't supported when using service principal.
• Dedicated capacity is required when moving to production.
• You can't sign into the Power BI portal using service principal.
• Power BI admin rights are required to enable service principal in developer settings within the Power BI admin portal.
• You can't install or manage an on-premises data gateway using service principal.
• Embed for your organization applications can't use service principal.
• Dataflows management is not supported.
• Service principal currently does not support any admin APIs.
• When using service principal with an Azure Analysis Services data source, the service principal itself must have an Azure Analysis Services instance permissions. Using a security group that contains the service principal for this purpose, doesn't work.

In addition, hope the following documentations can help you.

Dataset refresh error Service principal

Service principal cant update data source as not the owner 

Best Regards

Rena

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi yingyinr,

the issue could be resolved by manually taking ownership and change the data source connection manually. 

[v-yiruan-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Thanks a lot for sharing your solution. It will be very helpful for the others in the community when they face the same problem with you. 

Best Regards

Rena