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Help Desk

How can we help?

Setup guides, troubleshooting and answers from the Power BI Sentinel team.

Try “service principal”, “connection string” or “workspace permissions”

Getting started

New here? Start with these four

Setup Guide
Connect your Power BI and Microsoft Fabric estate end to end: database, storage and authentication.
Service Principal Setup
Step by step for the Service Principal connection route, as an alternative to SSO.
ABF Backups
Semantic model level backups as a fallback alongside your main PBIX report backups.
Tenant Permissions
What access Power BI Sentinel actually needs, and why: workspace roles and API scopes.
Tenant Setup
8 articles
🔐 Why does a Configured User need Contributor access to a workspace?
Power BI Sentinel downloads a copy of each report to back it up, and Power BI only allows that at Contributor level or above. Viewer is not enough.
⛓️‍💥 How Power BI Sentinel Connects to Your Power BI Estate
Power BI Sentinel requires access to your organization’s Power BI / Microsoft Fabric environment to enable its governance, auditing, and backup capabilities. There are two…
❓What does the “Only use Service Principal” do in the tenant settings?
By default, Sentinel will scan your lineage using all available user accounts, and combine the results into a single complete set. If the Service Principal…
❓ What if we are using PIM – Privileged Identity Management to manage security to our Power BI tenant
If you are using Privileged Identity Management to restrict admin access to your Power BI Tenant, either on a permanent or timed basis, this will…
🗃️ Why are my logs not populating the Azure SQL database?
Some of the most common causes of empty SQL databases are listed below
🔐What Permissions to the Power BI Service does Power BI Sentinel need?
This page looks at Power BI API user permissions required. If you are configuring a service principal, please see the following resource: https://www.powerbisentinel.com/creating-a-service-principal-and-connecting-to-power-bi/ By default,…
🛠️ Troubleshooting the SQL Database connection string
If your string is failing to validate, there may be several reasons for this. The first item to check is the method of validation. Currently…
❓ How do you setup Power BI Sentinel?
Setting up Power BI Sentinel takes a few hours. Create your Azure storage account and SQL database, connect them in the portal and data lands overnight.
General Queries
8 articles
🔐 Why does a Configured User need Contributor access to a workspace?
Power BI Sentinel downloads a copy of each report to back it up, and Power BI only allows that at Contributor level or above. Viewer is not enough.
👩‍💻 What is a Configured User?
What is a configured user in Power BI Sentinel? Find out where the Configured by column lives, how it gets set and how to change it if an account is disabled.
🧑‍💻 How to use the Power BI Sentinel Portal
Below is a portal overview video guide, to show all of the features available via the portal, and how to configure specific items.
🔍- What’s the difference between Microsoft Purview and Power BI Sentinel
What is Microsoft Purview? Microsoft Purview is the new name for a suite of governance and compliance tools within Azure. It used to be called…
🌎 Is Power BI Sentinel available on US GCC, Government Community Cloud?
Unfortunately Power BI Sentinel is not yet available on the US GCC. We are however building a business case to set up a deployment of…
💡 What if we need extra functionality?
We’re always looking to enhance the product further. Please send any feedback and functionality requests to us via our contact page, or email Help@powerbisentinel.com
❓ Which workspaces can I back up?
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…
❓Does Power BI Sentinel integrate with other applications?
We are currently set up to only integrate with Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. This is specifically PowerBI.com, and not the on-premises Power BI…