5A. Create and manage workspaces in Power BI

Question 1

What is a workspace, and what benefits do they offer?

Answer 1

A feature of Power BI. A workspace is a centralized repository in which you can collaborate with colleagues and teams to create collections of reports and dashboards.

Workspaces are create and exist in Power BI service.

Workspaces offer the following benefits:
- Focused collaboration efforts. You can use workspaces to house reports and dashboards for use by multiple teams.
- Ability to share and present reports and dashboards in a single environment.
- Assurance that the highest level of security is maintained by controlling who can access semantic models, reports, and dashboards.

Question 2

Who can get notified when there is an issue with a workspace, and where do you change this setting?

Answer 2

• In the Advanced drop-down menu, you can create a Contact list of users who will receive notifications if issues with the workspace occur.
• By default, these users are the workspace admins, but you can also add specific users.

Question 3

What does it mean for a workspace to be part of a “dedicated capacity?”

Answer 3

Dedicated capacities are Power BI Premium features that ensure that your workspace will have its own computational resources as opposed to sharing resources with other users.

Question 4

What are workspace roles, and which are there, and what are some best practices around assigned roles to members?

Answer 4

Workspace roles allow you to designate who can do what within a workspace.

There are four roles for workspaces, and it’s advised that you grant the minimum access necessary to collaborators.

Admin
- Update and delete the workspace
- Add or remove people, including other admins

Member
- Add members or others with lower permissions
- Publish, unpublish, and change permissions for an app

Contributor
- Create, edit, and delete content, such as reports, in the workspace
- Publish reports to the workspace

Viewer
- View and interact with an item
- Read data that’s stored in workspace dataflows

Question 5

Can pro and non-Pro users interact with the same workspace?

Answer 5

If the workspace is backed by a Premium capacity, a non-Pro user can view content within the workspace under the Viewer role.

Question 6

When it comes to users who will only consume reports in a workspace, there is an alternative to assigning them the Viewer role, which might be preferable. Which?

Answer 6

For consumers, skip workspace role assignment, and provide access through the app instead.

Question 7

What types of members can you add to a workspace role?

Answer 7

You can add
- email addresses of individual users
- mail-enabled security groups
- distribution lists
- Microsoft 365 groups
- Regular security groups
and then assign them to their specific roles.

Question 8

What is an app, in the sense of workspace content?

Answer 8

An app is a published, read-only window into your data in a workspace for mass distribution and viewing.

The course content doesn’t state this outright, but it seems like there can only be one app per workspace, but it is possible to give different audiences view access to different parts of the workspace. Note that workspace users (roles) are automatically included as an audience for the app, and then you can add additional users.

Question 9

What license(s) is required to publish and access apps?

Answer 9

• Publishing an app requires a Power BI Pro license.
• Consuming and viewing an app also requires a Pro license, or the workspace must be hosted in a Premium capacity.

Question 10

What are helpful field to fill out when creating an app?

Answer 10

Use the Contact Information and Support Site fields to help users contact the appropriate person(s) and how to find help for the app.

Question 11

What are the two advanced permissions options you can toggle when creating a workspace app?

Answer 11

• Allow people to share the semantic models in the app audience
• Allow people to build content with the semantic models in the app audience

Question 12

What is it good to keep tabs on usage and performance of your workspace app?

Answer 12

It is is crucial because it:
- Focuses your efforts for improvement. If you know the areas that experience the worst performance, you can concentrate your efforts for improvement in those areas.
- Quantifies the impact of your reports. Usage metrics help you determine your reports’ success.

Question 13

Who can access workspace app usage metrics reports?

Answer 13

Usage metric reports are available for Power BI Pro users and can only be accessed by users with the role types of
- Admin
- Member
- Contributor

Question 14

What items/objects are usage metrics reports generated for?

Answer 14

Objects in workspaces, so reports, dashboards, semantic models, etc.

Question 15

What kind of details can you view in a usage metrics report’s Report usage tab?

Answer 15

• Viewers per day, Unique viewers per day (which doesn’t include users who returned to the same reports multiple times), and Shares per day charts
• Total Views, Total Viewers, and Total Shares KPI cards
• Total views and shares ranking (compares how your report is doing in comparison to other reports in the app)
• Views by Users (details about each specific user that viewed the dashboard)

You can also filter by the distribution method of the report (for example, through sharing or from the workspace directly) and platform type (for example, mobile or web).

Question 16

What kind of details can you view in a usage metrics report’s Report performance tab?

Answer 16

• Typical opening time - How long it takes, at the fiftieth percentile, to open the report.
• Opening time trend - How the typical opening time changes over time. This metric can tell you how the report is performing as the number of users starts to grow.
• Daily/7-Day Performance charts - Highlight the performance for 10, 50, and 90 percent of the open-report actions every day and over a seven-day period.
• Filters for date, so you can see how the performance changes according to the day.

Question 17

What is the development life cycle, and what does it typically look like?

Answer 17

The development life cycle is another name for the iterative process that results in the release of a product, like a report or an app. It typically requires:
- building an initial solution
- testing the solution in a different environment
- returning to make necessary revisions
- eventually releasing a final product.

This process can take place in several different ways and in different environments.

Question 18

What is the Deployment pipeline feature, and what are the advantages to using it?

Answer 18

The deployment pipeline feature in Power BI manages content in dashboards, reports, and semantic models between different environments in the development life cycle. With this feature, you can develop and test Power BI content in one centralized location and streamline the process before deploying the final content to your users.

The overall benefit of using the deployment pipeline is to help accelerate development and minimize errors.

Specifically, the advantages of using the deployment pipeline are:
- Increased productivity - Through this feature, you can reuse previous deployment pipelines, ensuring that efforts aren’t duplicated.
- Faster delivery of content - Report development becomes more streamlined, meaning that it takes less time to get to production.
- Lower human intervention required - Having the ability to reuse deployment pipelines means a decreased chance of error associated with moving content from one environment to another.

Question 19

What license and role is required to use the deployment pipeline?

Answer 19

• Power BI Premium
• Capacity admin

Additionally, only workspaces that are assigned to a Premium capacity can be added to deployment pipeline environments

Question 20

What are the three environments in the deployment pipeline and what are their associated tasks?

Answer 20

• Development - The location in which dashboard developers or semantic modelers can build new content with other developers. This stage is first in the deployment pipeline.
• Test - Where a small group of users and user acceptance testers can see and review new reports, provide feedback, and test the reports with larger semantic models for bugs and data inconsistencies before it goes into production.
• Production - Where an expansive user audience can use tested reports that are reliable and accurate. This stage is the final one of the deployment pipeline.

You can choose which one of these development environments that you want to include in your deployment pipeline, according to your business needs. For example, you can choose to only include the Test and Production environments, if necessary.

Question 21

What are some thing to remember about deployment pipelines?

Answer 21

• You can only add one workspace to a pipeline, to one environment, and the workspaces for the other two environments will be auto-generated.
• You can configure rules for what data sources are used in which environment, so that as you move assets from development, to testing, to production, they automatically use new data sets.
• When a developer modifies a report, for example in the development environment, from the pipeline page you can compare the corresponding reports between the development and testing environment, and see how they differ–i.e. see what’s new about the report in the development environment. You can then choose to deploy that change to the next stage or not.
• Exercise caution with this tool. Reports are dependent on their semantic models. If a semantic model has changed, but you don’t deploy it with an associated report, the report will not behave correctly.

Question 22

What is the lineage view feature?

Answer 22

Data lineage refers to the path that data takes from the data source to the destination.

The Lineage view feature in Power BI allows you to quickly refresh semantic models and see the relationships between the artifacts in a workspace and their external dependencies.

In short, you can see how the following artifacts in a workspace are connected in terms of how data moves from one to the next:
- Data sources
- Semantic models and dataflows
- Reports
- Dashboards

Typically, the flow would be data sources > semantic models/dataflows > reports > dashboards.

You can click on the lower right corner of an artifact and see the specific flow that that artifact participates in.

Question 23

Why is the lineage view feature crucial?

Answer 23

It:
- Simplifies the troubleshooting process because you can see the path that the data takes from source to destination and determine pain points and bottlenecks.
- Allows you to manage your workspaces and observe the impact of a single change in one semantic model to reports and dashboards.
- Saves time by simplifying your task of identifying reports and dashboards that haven’t been refreshed.

Note that you can refresh semantic models from within lineage view.

Question 24

Which workspace roles have access to lineage view?

Answer 24

• Admin
• Contributor
• Member

Question 25

Which license and workspace type is required for lineage view?

Answer 25

Power BI Pro, and an app workspace

Question 26

What types of metadata can you view about a semantic model from within linage view? What about reports and dashboards?

Answer 26

• the sensitivity (also about reports and dashboards)
• by whom it was configured (contact for reports and dashboards)
• the last refresh date (last update for reports and dashboards)
• the names and count of tables within this semantic model
• (for reports and dashboards you can also toggle whether they are included in the workspace app)

Question 27

What is the impact analysis window in lineage view, and what can you use it for?

Answer 27

You can access this view about any semantic model in your lineage view. On the Impact analysis window, you can see how many workspaces, reports, and dashboards that this semantic model is a part of and how many views that this semantic model has gathered, as shown in the following screenshot. The bottom of the Impact Analysis window includes more detail about which specific reports and dashboards that this semantic model is part of.

Additionally, you can select Notify contacts, which allows you to notify semantic model owners (or any other user) of changes in the semantic model.

Impact analysis is useful because it allows you to pinpoint semantic models that aren’t being used or looked at.

Question 28

What useful options can you access by clicking the ellipsis for reports shown in your lineage view?

Answer 28

From this menu, you can select to
- analyze the report in Microsoft Excel
- delete a report
- create Quick Insights
- save a copy to a workspace
- and more

Question 29

What can you do in Power BI to ensure that sensitive data is secure?

Answer 29

• Use Microsoft sensitivity labels to label dashboards, reports, semantic models, and dataflows by using the same taxonomy that is used to classify and protect files in Microsoft 365.
• Add more protection measures such as encryption and watermarks when you are exporting the data.
• Use Microsoft Cloud App Security to monitor and investigate activities in Power BI.

Question 30

What are sensitivity labels?

Answer 30

• Sensitivity labels specify which data can be exported.
• These labels are configured externally to Power BI, and Power BI allows you to quickly use them in your reports and dashboards.
• These labels allow you to define and protect content, even outside of Power BI.
• Semantic models, dataflows, reports, and dashboards can use this mechanism
• All users in your corporation can use this feature unless exceptions have been defined.

Question 31

How do sensitivity labels interact with the options of exporting data to Excel, PowerPoint and PDF?

Answer 31

• Data that is exported to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and PDF files will have sensitivity labels enforced
• For instance, if you wanted to export data from Sales Data into an Excel file, if you are an authorized user, you will see the Sensitivity label between the sheet and formula bar when opening the file.
• However, if you didn’t have established permissions, you would be denied access to see the data.

Question 32

Where can you set up sensitivity labels?

Answer 32

Microsoft 365 Security Center