Frequently asked questions about Power BI Embedded

Microsoft Power BI Embedded (PBIE) allows application developers to embed stunning, fully interactive reports into their applications without having to build their own data visualizations and controls from scratch.

Developers and software companies, also known as independent software vendors (ISVs), coding applications.

Power BI is a software-as-a-service analytics solution that gives organizations a single view of their most critical business data.

Microsoft developed Power BI Embedded for ISVs wanting to embed visuals into their applications to help their customers make analytic decisions. This spares ISVs from having to build their own analytics' solution themselves. Embedded analytics enables business users to access business data and execute queries against it to generate insights within the application.

Power BI Premium is capacity geared toward enterprises who want a complete BI solution that provides a single view of its organization, partners, customers, and suppliers. Power BI Premium helps your organization make decisions. Power BI Premium is a SaaS product that allows users to consume content through mobile apps, internally developed apps, or at the Power BI portal.

Power BI Embedded is for ISVs who want to embed visuals into their applications. Power BI Embedded helps your customers make decisions because Power BI Embedded is for application developers, customers of that application can consume content stored on Power BI Embedded capacity, including anyone inside or outside the organization. You can't share Power BI Embedded capacity content through one-click publish to Web or one-click publish to SharePoint.

Microsoft recommends that enterprises buy Power BI Premium, an enterprise-grade, self-service cloud BI solution. We recommend ISVs buy Power BI Embedded for its cloud-powered embedded analytics components. However, a customer has no restriction on which product to buy.

There may be some cases where an ISV (typically large), in addition to app embedding, wants to use a P SKU to get the extra benefits of the pre-packaged Power BI service within their organization.

For more on the differences between Premium and Embedded, see Which SKU should I use.

Embed tokens with Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license are intended for development testing, so a Power BI master account or service principal can only generate a limited number of tokens. Purchase a capacity for embedding in a production environment. There's no limit to how many embed tokens you can generate when you purchase a capacity. In development testing, you can use free embed trial tokens with a Pro license. To embed in a production environment, you must purchase a capacity.

Embedded Premium capacities don't provide an out-of-the-box vertical autoscale feature. To learn about alternative autoscale options for Embedded Premium capacities, see [Autoscaling in Embedded(./azure-pbie-scale-capacity.md#autoscale-your-capacity).

Power BI Embedded Premium evaluates your level of utilization by aggregating utilization records every 30 seconds. Each evaluation is composed of two different aggregations: Interactive utilization and background utilization.

Interactive utilization is evaluated by considering all the interactive operations that completed on or near the current half-minute evaluation cycle.

Background utilization is evaluated by considering all the background operations that completed during the past 24 hours, where each background operation contributes only 1/2880 of its total CPU cost (there are 2880 evaluation cycles in each 24-hour period).

A capacity consists of a defined number of v-cores. The Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app tracks the utilization of your capacity v-cores. The CPU usage reported in the app drives the need to autoscale.

If you have an A1 capacity with one v-core, each evaluation cycle quota is 30 seconds (1*30) of CPU utilization. If the sum of your CPU utilization exceeds the total v-core quota in your capacity, the capacity enters a temporary interactive request delay mode, during which each interactive request (such as report load, visual interaction, and so on) is delayed before it's sent to the engine for execution. The amount of delay is proportional to the amount of overload detected. Overload of 100% will incur a delay of 20 seconds, while overloads smaller than 10% are allowed.

The capacity stays in interactive request delay mode if the previous evaluation is at greater than 100% resource usage.

The following events are interactive operations:

• Datasets - Report View, Query, XMLA read
• Dataflows
• Paginated Report - paginated report render

The following are background operations:

• Datasets - scheduled refresh, on-demand refresh, background query (after refresh)
• Dataflows - scheduled dataflow refresh
• Paginated reports - data driven subscriptions renders
• AI

Your metrics report dataset retains 30 to 45 days of data. You can use the report to indicate how close you're to your capacity's maximum resources, and if you save monthly snapshots, you can compare them to indicate trends of growth and extrapolate the rate in which you'll arrive at 100% utilization of your resources.

There are two options for Embedded Premium:

• The Capacity management page in the Power BI admin portal has a utilization notification checkbox. Users can select the threshold at which an alert will be triggered (the default is 80%), and the email address to which utilization alerts should be sent.
• Configure an Azure Alert using the Premium CPU metric.

The Power BI service stores over 90 days of utilization data. Users who need longer data retention can use Bring Your Own Log Analytics (BYOLA) to store more utilization data, which will be available for Embedded Premium customers by the Embedded Premium generally available (GA) date.

On the left side of the utilization report, a bar chart visual displays utilization information between workspaces for the time span of the report. The bar chart visual can be used for chargebacks, providing each workspace represents a different ISV customer, business unit, cost center, or other entity to which chargebacks can apply.

Refer to the Capacity and SKUs in Power BI embedded analytics article.

• Sign-in to your organizational directory (Microsoft accounts aren't supported).
• You need to have a Power BI tenant, that is, at least one user in your directory has signed up for Power BI.
• You need to have an Azure subscription in your organizational directory.

• Using the Power BI Admin portal.

• Downloading the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app in Power BI.

• Using Azure diagnostic logging.

While there's no automatic scaling now, all the APIs are available to scale at any time.

Capacity provisioning (scale/resume/create) may fail. You can use the Get Details API to check a capacity's ProvisioningState: Capacities - Get Details.

With the Multi-geo feature, you can purchase a Power BI Embedded capacity in a different region than your Power BI home tenant location

When a user is granted permissions to a workspace, app, or item, it might not be immediately available through API calls. The result can either be a missing item in a 'GET' API response, or an error when trying to use the item. The user can resolve this issue by calling refreshUserPermissions API, which updates the user permissions.

You can use the PBI portal to find your PBI Tenant region.

https://app.powerbi.com/ > ? > About Power BI

• You can create PBIE for your tenant with subscription type CSP
• Partner account can sign in to customer tenant and purchase PBIE for customer tenant, specify customer tenant user as Power BI capacity admin

Power BI requires you to sign up with an organizational account. Trying to sign up for Power BI using a Microsoft account isn't supported.

Yes, there are PowerShell cmdlets and Azure Resource Manager REST APIs you can use to create and manage PBIE resources.

• Rest APIs
• PowerShell cmdlets

To promote your solution to production, you need to assign the Power BI content (workspace) your application uses to a Power BI Embedded (A SKU) capacity.

Power BI Embedded is non-regional. This means it's not dependent on any specific Azure region.

See Azure Products by Region for regional information about all Azure products.

Power BI Embedded continues to use Microsoft Entra ID for master user (a designated Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licensed user) authentication, or with service principal for authenticating the application inside Power BI.

An ISV can implement their own authentication and authorization for their applications.

You can use your existing directory if you already have a Microsoft Entra tenant. You can also create a new Microsoft Entra tenant for your embedded application content security.

To get a Microsoft Entra token, use one of the Microsoft Authentication Libraries. There are client libraries available for multiple platforms.

The Object ID from the main screen of a registered app is the object ID for the app.

The object ID found in the Managed application in local directory > Properties section is the service principal object ID you need to use. This object ID is to reference a service principal for operations or to make changes to the service principal object ID. Such as applying a service principal as an admin to a workspace.

You must have a Power BI account before purchasing Power BI Embedded in Azure. Your Power BI Embedded deployed region determines your Power BI account. Manage your Power BI Embedded resource in Azure to:

• Scale up/down
• Add capacity admins
• Pause/resume service

Use PowerBI.com to assign/un-assign workspaces to your Power BI Embedded capacity.

There's often confusion around when to use RLS versus JavaScript filters. One method is about controlling what a specific user can see, and the other is about optimizing the user's view.

With RLS, the ISV developer controls the data filtering as part of the model creation and embed token generation. The end user sees only what the ISV allows the user to see. In this case, the user can choose to see less than what's being filtered, but won't be able to bypass the RLS configuration and see more than what's allowed.

With client-side filtering (JavaScript), the ISV might decide what the end user sees in the initial view, but they can't control changes the end user might apply to the view itself. Since user JavaScript client code can trigger data filtering on the backend, it can't be considered secure.

Once you enable service principal to use with Power BI, the application's AD permissions don't take effect anymore. The application's permissions are then managed through the Power BI admin portal.

Service principals inherit the permissions for all Power BI tenant settings from their security group. To restrict permissions, create a dedicated security group for service principals and add it to the Except specific security groups list for the relevant, enabled Power BI settings.

This situation matters when you add the service principal as an admin to the new workspace. You can manage this task through the APIs or with the Power BI service.

The application ID, also known as client ID, is used to create the access token when passing the application ID for authentication.

To reference a service principal for operations or to make changes you use the service principal object ID — for example, applying a service principal as an admin to a workspace.

To embed a Power BI report that contains a paginated report visual with the embed for your customers method, use a service principal and embed the report with a multi-resource embed token, that contains the following:

• Power BI report ID
• Paginated report ID (of the report the visual is connected to)
• Dataset ID (of the Power BI report)

The service principal must have access to both reports (paginated and Power BI). Request body example for the generate token call:

{
  "datasets": [
    {
      "id": "a5d577c7-0568-4180-a6d3-0f6cc0ca3df4"
    }
  ],
  "reports": [
    {
      "allowEdit": false,
      "id": "05024421-b4df-483c-a2ce-61202d0323ce"
    },
    {
      "id": "f8612306-f3a8-40e1-a448-d8e05992a007"
    }
  ]
}

No - you can't sign into Power BI using service principal.

Also, you can't consume content as a user in external applications (SaaS embed), only when you generate an embed token.

Power BI Embedded performance

Power BI Embedded is available through Azure.

Customers continue to pay for any existing Power BI Premium purchases until the end of their current agreement term and then, at that point, may switch their Power BI Premium purchases as necessary.

No, Power BI Embedded includes the Azure-based capacity that you need to deploy and distribute your solution to customers.

Customers may change their usage on an hourly basis. There's no monthly or annual commitment for the Power BI Embedded service.

Power BI Embedded bills on a predictable hourly rate based on the type of node(s) deployed. You're billed as long as your resource is active, even if there's no usage. You need to pause your resource to stop billing.

You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license or service principal to use REST APIs. To add reports to a Power BI workspace, an analyst needs either a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license or service principal. To manage Power BI tenant and capacity, an admin is required have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.

Because Power BI Embedded allows Power BI portal use for managing and validating embedded content, the Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license is required to authenticate the app inside PowerBI.com to get access to the reports in the right repositories.

However, for creating/editing embedded reports inside your application, the end user does not need a Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license as the user isn't required to be a Power BI user at all.

Yes, you can use your Azure credits for Power BI Embedded.

Since Power BI Embedded is a part of Azure, it's possible to use the service with the $200 credit received when signing up for Azure.

Power BI Embedded is also available for national/regional clouds.

There's no special Azure pricing for non-profit and educational entities.

Power BI Workspace Collection (Power BI Embedded Version 1) is a solution based on the Power BI Workspace Collection Azure resource. This solution allows you to create Power BI Embedded applications for your customers using Power BI content under the Power BI Workspace Collection solution, dedicated APIs, and workspace collection keys to authenticate the application to Power BI.

Yes, but customers that are already using the Power BI Workspace Collection solution can continue to use it until deprecation. Customers can also create new workspace collections and any Power BI Embedded applications that still use the Power BI Workspace Collection solution.

However, this also means that new features aren't added to any Power BI Workspace Collection solutions. We encourage customers to plan their migration to the new Power BI Embedded solution.

Customers that are already using the Power BI Workspace Collections solution can continue to use it until the end of their support agreement.

The available regions are Australia Southeast, Brazil South, Canada Central, East US 2, Japan East, North Central US, North Europe, South Central US, Southeast Asia, UK South, West Europe, West India, and West US.

There are some Power BI Embedded solution features and capabilities that you can't do with Power BI Workspace Collection.

Some of the features are:

• All the PBI data sources are supported. Only two Power BI Workspace Collection data sources are supported.
• Features such as Q&A, refresh, bookmarks, embedding dashboards & tiles, and custom menus are only supported in the Power BI Embedded solution.
• Capacity billing model.

The Embedding setup tool allows you to quickly get started and download a sample application to begin embedding with Power BI.

• Embedding for your customers provides the ability to embed dashboards and reports to users who don't have an account for Power BI. In the Embedding setup tool, run the Embed for your customers solution.
• Embedding for your organization allows you to extend the Power BI service. In the Embedding setup tool, run the Embed for your organization solution.

If you're working with the Embed for your customers experience, save and unzip the PowerBI-Developer-Samples.zip file. Then open the PowerBI-Developer-Samples-master\App Owns Data folder and run the PowerBIEmbedded_AppOwnsData.sln file.

If you're working with the Embed for your organization experience, save and unzip the PowerBI-Developer-Samples.zip file. Then open the PowerBI-Developer-Samples-master\User Owns Data\integrate-report-web-app folder and run the pbi-saas-embed-report.sln file.

To learn how to edit Microsoft Entra registered applications, see Quickstart: Update an application in Microsoft Entra ID.

You can learn how to edit your Power BI data here.

For more information, see Troubleshooting your embedded application.

More questions? Try the Power BI Community