In today’s dynamic landscape, Power BI stands out as a pivotal and indispensable tool. It has swiftly become the go-to choice for organizations seeking robust reporting and comprehensive dashboards. Within its data-rich framework lie the essential insights that drive informed business decisions.
Moreover, there are many scenarios where an organization may need to migrate its Power BI tenant. For example, if Company A acquires Company B or Company B merges with Company A, it is essential to transfer all the Power BI data of Company B to Company A’s tenant. Power BI migration can be tricky as there are limited support options for Power BI migration compared to other tools such as Power Apps or Power Automate.
This is where Fractal comes into the picture with its in-house solution that companies can leverage to migrate their Power BI data from one tenant to another.
What is a tenant?
A tenant represents an organization. It’s a dedicated instance of Azure Active Directory AD that an organization or app developer receives at the beginning of a relationship with Microsoft. For example, this relationship could start with signing up for Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365.
Common challenges of tenant-to-tenant migrations
Tenant-to-tenant migration involves multiple parties and teams within each organization, and these groups will be interdependent on the migration tasks. A roadmap that outlines the task owners and their dependencies must be followed.
When Power BI assets, such as reports, datasets, dataflows, etc., are published in a new tenant, their GUIDs (globally unique IDs) change. Thus, these GUIDs need to be carefully modified to make the dependent assets work.
In addition, when company mergers take place, it is often that their SharePoint sites and SharePoint lists also get migrated. Power BI reports using these SharePoint sites would not work as migration of these SharePoint sites would change the Object IDs on the SharePoint side. So, new Object IDs must be placed on the Power BI side to make it work.
There are many such corner cases in tenant-to-tenant Power BI data migrations. For brevity, we will not delve deeply into them. It is essential that these migrations are handled with careful attention and coordinated effort among stakeholders to ensure their success.
How to perform a tenant-to-tenant Power BI data migration
Pre-requisites
- Preferably a global admin in source tenant
- Power BI Pro or Premium Per User Licenses as per requirement in both source and target tenant
- Apart from personal accounts in both tenants, a common service account to setup refreshes in the target tenant
Instructions
Step 1: Analyses of Power BI data in source tenant
All the information related to the Power BI assets is extracted first. This includes information on workspaces, reports, gateways, workbooks, datasets, etc. This would provide us with the intuition on what all thing needs to be migrated.
Step 2: Download all the reports
Download all the reports via automated scripts and keep them on local system. The reports having incremental refresh implemented can’t be downloaded. For this, we need to ask developers to provide us with the source .pbix files. Make sure that all developers stop their developments before you start downloading the reports to avoid version mismatch.
Step 3: Setting up target tenant
Ask your clients to setup all the infrastructure such as gateways, data sources, and VM in target tenant as they have it in their source tenant. Moreover, they also need to provide access on these gateways and data sources to the person who is migrating.
Step 4: Workspace creation
Create all the required workspaces in target tenant with the same configuration as source tenant.
Step 5: Modify reports
We need to modify reports where source applications are also being migrated such as SharePoint, etc.
For datasets, which are ingesting data from Power BI Dataflows or any other Power BI services asset, we need to modify their asset IDs in reports.
Step 6: Publish reports
Upload/Publish all the reports and datasets in their respective workspaces via automated scripts.
Step 7: Attach the data sources to the datasets
Using the common service account, attach the respective data sources to their datasets using automated scripts. Using the same common account, setup the scheduled refreshes using the automated scripts.
Step 8: Create all related Power BI assets
Create all dashboards, apps, workbooks, scorecards, and others which is created in only Power BI services from scratch manually.
Step 9: Provide access
Provide same users access on workspaces and reports as they had in their source tenants.
Step 10: Power BI capacities
If applicable, attach the workspaces to their capacities in target tenant. But first new capacities need to be setup in target tenant.
Step 11: User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
Ask users to perform UAT and inform in case of any discrepancies.
Limitations
- Assets that are created in Power BI services cannot be migrated. They need to be created from scratch in target tenant.
- Source tenant capacities cannot be reused in target tenant. New capacities need to be bought and setup.
Why Fractal?
There are a few advantages of working with a Microsoft Solutions Partner like Fractal to help you with your tenant-to-tenant Power BI data migration.
- Microsoft does not provide services for Power BI data migration from one tenant ID to another tenant ID. Fractal has the right tools and expertise to support clients looking for such requirements.
- There are also many dependencies in the whole process. Fractal has the proper roadmap on the execution of whole migration which includes steps for all the parties and has helped many clients in migrating their data.
Fractal demonstrated its expertise by assisting a client during a company acquisition. The client needed to migrate over 1500 Power BI reports to the parent tenant. Fractal not only devised a tailored execution plan for the migration but also completed it ahead of schedule. Remarkably, after the migration, end users continued to enjoy a seamless experience with the reports in the parent tenant, just as they did in the old tenant.
If you want to learn more about tenant-to-tenant Power BI migration? Contact us to speak to one of our experts.
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