Post last updated: May 31, 2023 (this post is being updated as I learn more)
The Power BI Administrator role is about to be renamed to Microsoft Fabric Administrator. (Here’s the short announcement.)
What does this really mean? Is it more than a name change? You bet it is!
We know that the Power BI Admin Portal is becoming the Fabric Admin Portal. We also know that the entire Power BI infrastructure is the starting basis for Microsoft Fabric. Meaning that…
We can see that the scope of administrator responsibilities is expanding to include the foundation of the Fabric SaaS platform.
The learning path on administering Microsoft Fabric will give you a sense for how much broader in scope Fabric administration tasks are becoming. To help you get your head around this change…Matthew Roche wrote a very helpful blog: Where does Power BI end and Microsoft Fabric begin?
I also asked about this during the May 27th Guy In a Cube live stream. Check this video at the 45:40 time marker for the response from Adam and Matthew.
Ok, back to the main focus of this post. At this point, what should you be doing to prepare for this change?
(1) Verify who is currently a member of the Power BI Admin role
If you aren’t 100% certain who has been assigned membership - verify who is currently in this built-in Azure AD role.
An admin with sufficient rights to check the role assignments can find that info from any of these places:
Azure Active Directory (this is a better place to check than M365 if you’re using time-boxed access with Privileged Identity Management)
Usually we recommend having only a small number of administrators because it’s such a high-privilege role. If you have assigned a ton of people along the way, now is an excellent time to revisit who has what permissions and get that cleaned up.
(2) Verify who is currently a member of the Power Platform Admin and Global Admin roles
In addition to the Power BI Admin role, don’t forget to also double check your Power Platform roles as well as the Global Admin. They’re also allowed to manage Fabric!
For all 3 roles (Power BI admin, Power Platform admin, Global admin), make sure the role is assigned only who you want to include, and make adjustments as needed. Which leads me to the next item…
(3) Think about roles and responsibilities changes
As the role expands from Power BI admin to Fabric admin, the capabilities for the role are going to become broader and even more high-privilege.
Although the picture isn’t 100% clear yet, you probably want to start having conversations now about roles and responsibilities for how and who should be managing and overseeing Fabric. See if that lines up with who is currently a Power BI administrator or Power Platform administrator.
You might also need to think more about training for your administrators. Also, make sure you’ve done sufficient cross-training for when a backup administrator needs to step in and help.
(4) Check your scripts don’t depend on name
If you’re using APIs (for example, the Microsoft Graph API to regularly extract a list of members in the role), you might want to double check that you're using the ID instead of the name in your script parameters to ensure nothing breaks after the change happens.
Use the reference list of role IDs to find the correct template ID to use.
This post also shows how you can use Azure AD PowerShell to check the roles.
Even now, before the upcoming change to Fabric Administrator, in some areas the name is Power BI Administrator and in others it’s Power BI Service Administrator. Hence the importance of using the ID instead of name in any scripts.
Finding more information
Learning path: Administer Microsoft Fabric
How much data can a Power BI administrator access?
How do you manage who is permitted to be a Power BI administrator?