Tenant-to-tenant Power BI data migration
Power BI has emerged as one of the most used and critical tools in the contemporary world. It has become a prime candidate for companies that are looking for reporting and dashboarding. It holds all the important insights of a company that are required in business related decision-making.
Moreover, there are many scenarios where an organization may need to migrate their Power BI tenant. For example, if Company A acquires Company B or Company B merges with Company A. In these scenarios, it is essential to transfer all the Power BI data of Company B to Company A’s tenant. The migration of Power BI can be a bit 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 Neal Analytics comes into picture with an in-house product 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. That relationship could start with signing up for Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365, for example.
Source: Microsoft – Migrate mailboxes from one Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization to another
Common challenges of tenant-to-tenant migrations
Tenant-to-tenant migration includes multiple parties and teams within each organization, and these groups will have interdependencies in 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 new tenant, their GUIDs (globally unique IDs) change. Thus, carefully these GUIDs need to be 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. And 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 need to be placed on Power BI side as well to make it work.
There are many such corner cases, but for the sake of brevity I will not go deeply into those. The key thing is that tenant-to-tenant Power BI data migrations require keen attention and coordination among stakeholders to ensure 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 target tenant
Instructions
1. Analyses of Power BI data in source tenant
All the information related to all the assets of Power BI is extracted here. This will include information on workspaces, reports, gateways, workbooks, datasets, etc. This would provide us with the intuition on what all thing needs to be migrated.
2. Download all the reports
Download all the reports via automated scripts and keep them on local system. For reports having incremental refresh implemented, we can’t download the reports. For this, we need to ask developers to provide the source .pbix files to us. Make sure that all developers stop their developments before you start downloading the reports to avoid version mismatch.
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 had it in source tenant. Moreover, they also need to give access on these gateways and data sources to the person who is migrating.
4. Workspace creation
Create all the required workspaces in target tenant with the same configuration as source tenant.
5. Modify reports
We need to modify reports where source applications are also being migrated such as share point, etc.
For datasets, which are ingesting data from Power BI Dataflows or any other Power BI services asset, we need to modify these asset Ids in reports.
6. Publish reports
Upload/Publish all the reports and datasets in their respective workspaces via automated scripts.
7. Attach the data sources to the datasets
Using the common service account, attached the respective data sources to their datasets using automated scripts. Using the same common account, setup the scheduled refreshes using the automated scripts.
8. Create all related Power BI assets
Create all dashboards, apps, workbooks, scorecards, etc or anything which is created in only Power BI services from scratch manually.
9. Provide access
Provide same users access on workspaces and reports as they had in their source tenants.
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.
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 target tenant. New capacities need to be bought and setup.
Advantages of working with Neal Analytics
There are a few advantages of working with a Microsoft Solutions Partner like Neal Analytics 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. Neal Analytics has the tools and expertise to support clients looking for such requirements.
- There are also many dependencies in whole process. Neal Analytics 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.
Want to learn more about tenant-to-tenant migration? Contact us to speak to one of our experts.
