Frequently Asked Questions
Power BI is Microsoft’s dashboard and reporting tool, at https://PowerBI.com . It is generally considered one of the World’s leading business reporting and dashboard platforms.
Power BI Sentinel enhances Power BI, taking an already powerful tool and helping you manage it better. It adds automated backup, documentation, data lineage and change tracking over your Power BI reports.
You would still carry on using Power BI as normal, Sentinel just makes your life easier!
We get asked this a lot and quite rightly. There are some cross overs between PBI service and PBI Sentinel and we have listed the current differences below;
The PBI service now has a basic data lineage feature, however this has some significant limitations; no support for personal workspaces, and it is focused on developers wanting to see where data comes from, from the perspective of a report/workspace. It’s not tenant wide. Sentinel is tenant wide, supports personal workspaces, and crucially also allows you to look at lineage from the perspective of a data source, so you can answer questions such as “Where does data in my customer CRM database end up?”, which is vital for investigating/managing GDPR etc.
Other features that the service can’t provide include:
- Automated PBIX Backup and rollback
- Change tracking and comparison between current/historic PBIX versions
- Tenant wide search for columns (e.g. finding all datasets/reports that expose ‘email’ etc.)
- Risk Assessment report (highlighting failed backups, refresh failures, bloated personal workspaces, orphan datasets, etc.)
- Automated documentation generator
- Collaborative comments/descriptions on all PBI entities (reports, datasets, calculations, tables, data sources, workspaces, etc.)
- Historical usage tracking. The service gives you access to 7 days of logs, Sentinel stores the full history, so you can monitor and track adoption over time, as well as security breaches when someone is accessing reports they shouldn’t have access to.
- Architecture of your product.
No you don't but you do get more functionality:
Backups can fail for a number of reasons, use the grid below to get an explanation of the common reasons:
| Error Code | Description |
| ExportData_DisabledByTenant | The ‘Download reports’ facility has been disabled in your Power BI Admin portal’s Tenant settings, preventing backups. |
| ExportData_DisabledForModelModifiedByXmlaEndpoint | The dataset has been modified via xmla, and is no longer able to be downloaded. |
| ExportPBIX_ModelessWorkbookNotFound | The report/dataset was not created in Power BI Desktop, and cannot be backed up. E.g. internal Power BI ‘Usage Metrics Reports’ etc. |
| ModelExportActionDenied | The report/dataset was not created in Power BI Desktop, and cannot be backed up. E.g. internal Power BI ‘Usage Metrics Reports’, datasets created by Power BI Goals, reports created in the browser, etc |
| ModelWithIncrementalRefreshIsNotDownloadable | Datasets that use incremental refresh (i.e. partitioning) cannot be backed up |
| PowerBIEntityNotFound | The report/dataset cannot be found. The report may have been deleted, or the backup user does not have permission on the workspace. |
| PowerBINotAuthorizedException | The user that configured the backup does not have sufficient permission to this workspace. Contributor, Member or Admin permissions are required on the workspace. |
| ServerError_PremiumFilesErrors_OperationIsNotSupportedForPremiumFilesModel | Datasets in workspaces configured to use the ‘Large dataset storage format’ cannot be backed up |
| UnknownError | An unknown error has prevented the backup |
The only difference between the different Power BI Sentinel Enterprise plans is the number of reports that they can monitor, and how many of your users can access the Sentinel portal.
The plans are for up to 250 reports, up to 1000 reports, and up to 5000 reports.
If you have a larger estate than that then get in touch and we can create a bespoke tier for you.
Yes. We can offer purchase order/invoiced payments that cover a year or more. This is available when purchasing an Enterprise 1000 or higher license for a minimum of 12 months, and must be paid up front.
No, all our prices are exclusive of VAT, charged at the UK Rate (20%).
If you're a registered company not based in the UK then let us know and we can remove the VAT for you.
Payments will be taken on a recurring monthly or yearly cycle, depending how you choose to pay.
Get in touch with us and we can give you a demo walkthrough of the product.
There is no free trial period, but we do offer a no-quibble 14 day cancellation and refund policy, so you can try it out with no risk.
You can upgrade and downgrade your product tier at any time using the 'Subscription' page in your Power BI Sentinel portal.
Sentinel works by acting on your behalf to back up and change track your reports. This means your PowerBI.com user account has to have access to a workspace before Sentinel can back it up.
'Old Style' Workspaces (based on Office 365 groups)
If you're using 'old style' workspaces, you need to ask all workspace owners to grant you permission to see their workspaces.
'New Style' Workspaces (now the default, after April 2019)
Sentinel is able to perform most functionality using your 'Power BI Admin' role.
However in order to back up reports, you need to be a Contributor, Member or an Admin of each workspace.
If you need help in bulk allocating permissions to all workspaces let us know and we can help with this.
For further details on old Vs new workspaces, please see the Microsoft 'New Workspaces' page.
Which user account is used to do the backup?
The user account who sets or changes the backup schedule is used for all subsequent backup operations.
i.e. whoever last clicked the 'Save Changes' button in the Sentinel 'configure' screen.
The user account who sets or changes the backup schedule is used for all subsequent backup operations.
i.e. whoever last clicked the 'Save Changes' button in the Sentinel 'configure' screen.
It is important that this user account has sufficient access to all required workspaces.
Standard Access
To access the non-admin restricted login portal (https://my.PowerBISentinel.com) you don't need any special permissions, just a PowerBI.com account.
This portal allows you to see anything that you can see in PowerBI.com.
Admin Access
To get enhanced privileges you need to log into the admin portal (https://portal.PowerBISentinel.com). This allows you to see all shared workspaces.
To access this your user account must be a Power BI Administrator, configured in the Office 365 admin portal.
However, before you can do this you need an Office 365 Global Administrator to authorize Sentinel's access. This only needs to be done once, after which any of your Power BI admins can access the Sentinel admin portal.
This is all handled when you first log into the admin portal, where an enhanced set of permissions is requested.
See the following page for further permission details
All customers should get a response within 1 working day.
Please see our GDPR compliant terms and conditions.
If you’d like to discuss an affiliate scheme please contact us via the contact page.
We’d love you to stick around. But if you do decide to move on, our cancellation term is either immediately or until your next renewal date from the moment you click the Cancel your subscription button.
We are currently set up to specifically integrate with Microsoft Power BI.
This is specifically PowerBI.com, and not the on-premises Power BI Report Server.
Power BI Sentinel exports your audit logs, lineage, documentation, permissions, refresh history and other details into your own Azure SQL Database, so you're able to use this to then integrate with other applications if required.
Power BI Sentinel is ISO27001 certified.
Power BI Sentinel is regularly PEN Tested by an approved third party security consultancy.
It is also subjected to a weekly vulnerability scan by a different approved security organisation.
If you would like further information please contact us at help@powerbisentinel.com
We’re always looking to enhance the product further. Please send any feedback and functionality requests to us via our contact page.
During the signup process, there is a box to enter a discount code on the billing page.
When paying online using a credit card you can pay in USD or GBP.
When invoicing annually we can bill in USD, GBP, and EUR.
Power BI Sentinel is only available in English. But if there is enough demand this could be changed in the future – let us know what you want via the contact page!