Questions on capacities in PowerBI and its content

[ddfreedie]

Hi. I need a suggestion on the set up.

We have an open self service capacity which is where all default workspace is created. All self service users use this.

We have another capacity where it is highly moderated I.e. any report/model that goes into that capacity undergoes lot of review. There are enterprise wide reports going into the moderated capacity. These models can be open to others (business users or analyst) to create their own visuals/reports on top of this model (with their own excels data or others forming composite models) Such reports will be in workspace which will be in self service capacity.

So, is this a good approach of having the model (which is part of enterprise report) in one capacity and have the reports (created by analyst or users) in another capacity or is there something we need to consider.

[ddfreedie]

We have an open capacity (not moderated but somehow we manage to govern). This is open for anyone who wants to use powerbi. Kind of open to all.

One highly govered capacity where the workspaces are added to this capacity after review by team of experts.

The question is there may be a central data model undergone review in the highly goverened capacity. If there are some analyst or business users needing to create their own report on the non-governed capacity, based on the semantic model in the goverened capacity, what are the problems/impacts.

[lbendlin]

You are talking about "golden datasets semantic models".  While generally considered good practice they come with some baggage.  You are limited to three nesting levels, and if you consume someone else's (golden/promoted/certified) dataset semantic model all of your report users must have "installed" BOTH apps or (worse) have access to both workspaces. That is independent of the capacities the workspaces are in.

[ddfreedie]

If someone wants to build reports based on these semantic model, all they need is build access to the semantic model (but not its workspace). 

But my questions is more about best practise, advantages and disadvantages when semantic model is in one capacity and reports are in another capacity with both being in same tenant.

[lbendlin]

DO NOT give access to semantic models or workspaces (except for admins and UAT participants). Only ever give access through the app.

"Best Practice"  varies widely depending on if your company has a company wide concise data modeling concept,  how complex that is, what the governance looks like etc.  Are you all in on Azure down to Purview, or are you using a totally different data stewardship model?  What is the geographic distribution of your company compared to the geographic distribution of your Power BI capacities?  What about GDPR?  etc etc.  

[lbendlin]

Are these two capacities all you have?  What do you do if one of them goes down/is throttled?

It may not be advisable to allow anyone to create workspaces as they please.  Workspace creation should be moderated in my opinion.