BETA FEATURE: BI Optimizer and Talk to Your Data are beta features. Functionality, configuration steps, and supported options are subject to change as the feature evolves.
Tenant.Read.All is required to enable the following features in the Microsoft Power BI Cloud plugin: BI Optimizer, Lineage collection, Usage data, User Permissions, and Talk to Your Data. Each feature relies on a distinct Power BI Admin API that requires tenant-level read access to retrieve the metadata Metric Insights uses for governance, optimization, and data querying.
Tenant.Read.All permission grants read-only access to tenant-wide metadata in Power BI, including:
- Activity Logs
- Workspace information
- User permissions
Metric Insights maps this telemetry into its Microsoft Power BI Cloud plugin's Lineage, as well the Usage and User Permissions objects, which feed the insights essential for BI Optimizer's governance and cleanup, and into the semantic-model metadata that powers DAX generation for the Talk to Your Data feature.
- Lineage in Metric Insights is collected through the Get Activity Events API, which requires Tenant.Read.All. Lineage provides the metadata that reflects element and user dependencies: who is connected to what. This metadata is the basis of BI Optimizer. Enabling full Lineage collection is mandatory for BI Optimizer to function, since without this permission, the retrieved metadata will be incomplete and may not cover the required timeframe.
- The Usage Dataset is also powered by Power BI's Get Activity Events API, which requires Tenant.Read.All. These logs form the foundation of adoption and performance analysis, and in Metric Insights appear as Usage data.
- The User Permissions Dataset is powered by Power BI's Get Workspace Info API, which also requires Tenant.Read.All.
- The Talk to Your Data feature is powered by Power BI's Scanner APIs, all of which require Tenant.Read.All. Metric Insights uses the retrieved metadata to ground the LLM when generating DAX statements against a Power BI Semantic Model, enabling natural-language questions directly from the External Report Viewer without creating a Microsoft Fabric Data Agent.
This permission is safe and limited to metadata only; it cannot create, modify, or delete any Power BI resources. By granting Tenant.Read.All, BI Optimizer can deliver the insights required for report cleanup, governance, and optimization, and Talk to Your Data can ground its DAX generation in the tenant's semantic models, while relying solely on Microsoft's documented and supported Power BI Admin APIs.