Being an administrator in the Microsoft Power BI environment involves significant responsibilities such as managing the tenant settings on the Power BI admin portal, maintaining data privacy and compliance, and overseeing usage metrics. In this context, understanding the recommended settings in the Power BI admin portal becomes indispensable, particularly when preparing for the DP-500 exam: Designing and Implementing Enterprise-scale Analytics Solutions Using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power BI.
Power BI Admin Portal Overview
The Power BI admin portal provides a centralized platform for making global settings. It permits access to important settings, such as tenant settings, capacity settings, workspace settings, and data gateway supervision.
Let’s delve into how an administrator should configure these settings optimally to maintain a secure and efficient environment.
Tenant Settings
The Tenant settings, where crucial system-wide configurations happen, such as enabling or disabling Power BI features across the organization. For example, enabling the Power BI audit logs would permit admins to track user activities within the Power BI Service. This setting is particularly beneficial if suspicious behaviors are observed and audited.
Depending on the requirements, you can enable or disable features, such as sharing content with external users, exporting data, publishing reports to the web, and consumption of content packs. Administrators can set the level of access control for these features, designating it to the whole organization, certain security groups, or individual users.
Capacity Settings
It is an important consideration for implementing enterprise-scale analytics solutions. The capacity settings allow administrators to manage Power BI Premium capacities in the organization. Integrating with Power BI Premium offers advantages like more significant data capacity, scheduled data refresh rates, and access to Power BI Report Server to publish Power BI reports on-premises.
The capacity administration can influence performance, cost, and capacity distribution. Therefore, monitoring the resource utilization and adjusting the capacity as necessary is vital for optimum performance.
Workspace Settings
Workspaces in Power BI are containers for dashboards, reports, datasets, and dataflows. Administrators can review and manage all the workspaces in their organization from the Workspace settings in the admin portal.
Workspace management involves creating and managing workspace access, permissions, and classifications. Admins have the flexibility to monitor actions across the workspace, handle orphaned workspaces when the original owner of the workspace is no longer available, and set certain restrictions on workspace creation.
Data Gateway Management
The on-premises data gateway lets you securely transfer data from on-site premises to the Power BI service. Configuring a data gateway is pivotal for connecting Power BI to your organization’s on-premises data sources like SQL Server, SharePoint, and Oracle Database.
As an administrator, you’re responsible for installing, configuring, and managing the data gateways for the organization. Admins can supervise gateway clusters and their associated data sources, monitor gateway usage and performance metrics, and reconfigure or delete gateways when necessary.
In conclusion, understanding and configuring the Power BI Admin Portal settings is instrumental in managing and maintaining an efficient, secure, and high-performing analytics environment in Power BI. The efficacy of your Power BI setting directly impacts your organization’s ability to generate, share, and use insightful and secure business intelligence. Thus, this knowledge is indispensable for those aiming for the DP-500 certification.
Practice Test
Power BI admin portal gives administrators a destination to manage the Power BI settings and configuration for their organization.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: The Power BI admin portal is a centralized portal where administrators can manage all organizational settings, usage metrics, Power BI apps, and other configuration details.
Admins can increase the dataset size limit from the Power BI admin portal.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: B) False
Explanation: The maximum limit of a Power BI dataset is 1 GB for Power BI Pro and 10 GB for Power BI Premium. This limit cannot be increased from the admin portal.
In the Power BI admin portal, Admin can manage organizational visuals.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: Admins can manage all organizational visuals, which includes adding or removing approved visuals, in the Power BI admin portal.
Admins can review audit logs and usage metrics from the Power BI admin portal.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: A key feature of the Power BI admin portal is the ability to review usage metrics and audit logs to understand user behavior and take necessary measures.
From the Power BI admin portal, you can restrict publishing reports to the web.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: From the Tenant settings in Power BI admin portal, admins can manage export and sharing settings which includes restricting publishing reports to the web.
The Power BI admin portal provides settings to enable Power BI free licenses.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: B) False
Explanation: The Power BI admin portal doesn’t have an option to enable Power BI free licenses.
All users have access to the Power BI admin portal.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: B) False
Explanation: Only users with Power BI service administrator, Global administrator, or SharePoint Online administrator roles can access the admin portal.
In the Power BI admin portal, you can disable embedding content in Power BI reports.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: Yes, in Tenant settings admins can disable/enable embedding of Power BI content.
Power BI admin portal allows limiting external sharing by security groups.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: From the Power BI admin portal, admins can limit external sharing by security groups.
The Power BI admin portal allows for integration with Azure Active Directory.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: The Power BI admin portal uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for authentication and identity management.
Non-admin users can view usage metrics in the Power BI admin portal.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: B) False
Explanation: Only admins can view usage metrics in the Power BI admin portal, for non-admin users, these options are not available.
In the Power BI admin portal, you can manage capacity settings.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: Yes, Power BI admin portal provides admins the capability to manage capacity settings which includes creating and managing capacities and their assignments.
All settings changes in the Power BI admin portal take immediate effect.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: B) False
Explanation: Some settings changes can take up to 15 minutes to propagate through Power BI and take effect.
Power BI premium capacity settings are managed from the Power BI admin portal.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: Yes, with Power BI premium you can manage capacity settings from the admin portal to ensure the adequate resources are available for your Power BI content.
The Power BI admin portal allows admins to manage Power BI embedded settings.
- A) True
- B) False
Answer: A) True
Explanation: Yes, one of the many features of Power BI admin portal is the ability to manage settings for Power BI Embedded, which includes creating and managing capacities and their assignments.
Interview Questions
What is the primary purpose of the Power BI Admin portal?
The Power BI Admin portal is a centralized place for Power BI administrators to manage organization-level settings, data capacities, use audits, and much more.
What is the importance of Tenant settings in Power BI Service?
Tenant settings in Power BI Service is an umbrella term for all the configurations available to the admin in the Power BI admin portal. This includes a wide array of controls and preferences that can be set for the entire tenant environment, from sharing and collaboration settings to security and privacy considerations and minor visual preferences.
What is the purpose of the ‘Capacity settings’ in the Power BI Admin Portal?
The capacity settings in the Power BI Admin portal provide management capabilities for Power BI Premium capacities. Admins can monitor and manage the health of capacities, apply workload settings, and get usage insights.
Name one key setting you can activate in the Workload settings in Power BI Admin Portal?
One key setting you can activate is ‘Paginated reports’, which allows users to create and distribute highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports right alongside their Power BI interactive reports.
How does Power BI Admin Portal support data privacy and compliance?
Power BI Admin portal supports data privacy and compliance in various ways. This includes providing admins with top-level visibility into how data is being used in the organization, sharing settings that limit data distribution, auditing access and activity, and ensuring the integration with Azure security measures for a comprehensive and proactive data privacy approach.
What features does the audit log setting provide in the Power BI Admin portal?
The audit log in the Power BI admin portal provides a way to monitor and document all activities that occur within the platform. This includes data access, distribution, deletion, and alteration activities, amongst others. The logs can be used to resolve errors, monitor user activities, and ensure adherence to data compliance and security measures.
Can the Power BI Admin Portal be used for User and Group Management?
No, the Power BI Admin Portal doesn’t manage users or groups. This kind of management should be made through Azure Active Directory.
Which role should a user have to access the Power BI admin portal?
A user should be assigned to the Global or Power BI Service administrator role to access the Power BI admin portal.
Can the admin restrict the publication of reports in Power BI?
Yes, the admin can restrict the publication of reports by toggling the publish to the web setting.
How can you manage Power BI mobile settings in the Admin Portal?
The Power BI Mobile settings in the Power BI Admin portal allow administrators to control the level of access a user has to certain features of the Power BI Mobile app, such as sharing of content and so on.
Can an Admin use Power BI Admin Portal to upgrade user’s licenses?
No, managing the upgrade of user licenses should be done through Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
How can you set up security and compliance settings in the Power BI Admin portal?
The Power BI admin can control security and compliance settings by managing tenant-level data storage, configuring certification and sensitivity labels, and integrating with the Microsoft Compliance Center for advanced data protection capabilities.
How can an admin get usage metrics about Power BI in the organization?
An admin can get usage metrics through the ‘Usage metrics’ option in the Power BI admin portal. It provides insights about who is using Power BI and how.
What is the purpose of ‘Protection meteric’ in Power BI admin portal?
The ‘Protection Metric’ in Power BI admin portal provides details on how the data is protected within the Power BI environment. It measures how many datasets have sensitivity labels applied and the total number of views of reports based on protected datasets.
How can an admin manage API keys in Power BI Admin Portal?
API keys are managed through Azure portal, not the Power BI Admin Portal. The Power BI REST API doesn’t require a dedicated API Key but employs Azure Active Directory OAuth2 for authentication.