Unassigning a workspace to a deployment pipeline stage

It is possible to unassign a workspace from a deployment pipeline stage. To do this, click the menu for the stage and select Unassign workspace. The stage will need to be empty if you’d like to reassign the same workspace to this stage.

Automating deployment pipelines

Most software development teams utilize tools to automate processes and achieve continuous integration and continuous deployment. It’s possible to use automation with Power BI deployment pipelines as well. There are multiple ways automation can be achieved with deployment pipelines.

For development teams that use Azure DevOps, there is either the open source extension for Power BI development pipelines (https://github.com/microsoft/powerbi-azure-pipelines-extensions) or the use of PowerShell to automate the process. You can find PowerShell examples in the Power BI developer samples GitHub repository (https://github.com/microsoft/PowerBI-Developer-Samples/).

It’s also possible to automate deployment pipeline operations using the Power BI REST API (https://docs.microsoft.com/rest/api/power-bi/pipelines/). The REST API makes it possible to use many tools and processes, including custom applications, to facilitate the pipeline processes.

We will not go into depth on how to use these capabilities but for the purpose of the PL-300 exam, it is important to know these capabilities exist and how you would use them as an overall development process.

We will now look at how we can monitor the usage and performance of Power BI workspaces.

Monitoring workspace usage

Part of managing deployed workspaces includes understanding how the content they contain is used in the organization. Understanding how content such as reports and dashboards are used can help provide feedback on their improvement and the value the organization users get from them. For example, if a set of enterprise reports is created, tested, and deployed to production but never used or usage drops off, then it’s possible something is missing; perhaps the analysis is correct but the way the information is presented in the report visuals make it less useful, so users stop using the reports. Knowing how users use reports that have been deployed is a key part of managing Power BI workspaces. Usage metric reports are the way the Power BI service provides insight into how end users interact with your workspace content.