Microsoft provides detailed advice on using implementation pipelines in Power BI to manage the lifecycle of organizational content. Deployment pipelines enable BI creators to develop and test Power BI content in the Power BI service, before the content is consumed by users. The content types include reports, paginated reports, dashboards, datasets and dataflows.
Learning to Use Deployment Pipelines
Microsoft provides several resources to help users learn how to use deployment pipelines. These include a Power BI Learn module that walks users through creating a deployment pipeline, as well as an article that explains how to create a pipeline and key functions such as backward deployment and deployment rules.
I tried to use backward deployment when I had 3 workspaces (development, test and production). I used the pipeline to deploy a report from development to production. On the production workspace I had 5 more reports, not on the other workspaces.
When I tried to use backward deployment to get the 5 reports to test, the option was grayed out. I didn’t do any more testing but my educated guess is to first get all the reports backwards from production to development, before you start to go the other way.
Pipeline Structure
Deployment pipelines are designed as a pipeline with three stages: Development, Test, and Production.
Development Stage
The Development stage is used to design, build, and upload new content with fellow creators. This is the first stage in deployment pipelines.
Test Stage
After making all the needed changes to your content, you can upload the modified content so it can be moved to the Test stage. Here, you can share content with testers and reviewers, load and run tests with larger volumes of data, and test your app to see how it will look for your end users.
Production Stage
After testing the content, use the Production stage to share the final version of your content with business users across the organization.
Deployment Method
When you deploy content from the source stage to a target stage, the source content will overwrite anything with the same name in the target stage. Content in the target stage that doesn’t exist in the source stage remains in the target stage as is. After you select deploy, you’ll get a warning message listing the items that will be overwritten.
When you deploy datasets for example from development to test, probably you also want to change the connected database. For this you can use the deployment rules.
Watch out: after that you set a rule, this rule only activates when you deploy to the workspace where you configured the rule. In this example you should deploy the dataset again from development to test, to activate the rule on test.
Data lineage
It is always a good idea when you are setting up the implementation pipeline and upload reports and datasets that you go to data lineage to check:
- which report is connected to which dataset
- or which dataset is connected to which datasource (for example a database)
By doing so, you can avoid future issues. Additionally, while moving content from the development environment to production, Power BI may prompt you to login to authorize the data sources.
Next Steps
Microsoft provides several resources for users who want to learn more about using deployment pipelines in Power BI. These include articles on assigning a workspace to a pipeline stage, understanding the deployment process, automating your deployment pipeline using APIs and DevOps, troubleshooting deployment pipelines, and best practices for using deployment pipelines.
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