In our last post we talked about Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium. To recap, Power BI Pro is a per use license and is more towards content creation and consumption. On the other hand, Power BI Premium is a capacity license and is more for content consumption.
Rather than assigning a Pro license to every individual in your org, you can assign a premium capacity to a workspace to support large number of content viewers.
In this post we will tackle another Power BI offering – Power BI Embedded.
Power BI Embedded
Power BI Embedded is a Microsoft Azure service that lets independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers quickly embed visuals, reports, and dashboards into an application. This embedding is done through a capacity-based, hourly metered model.
Microsoft
Power BI Embedded is an offering by Microsoft where you can embed Power BI visuals, reports, and dashboards in a custom application or in associated Microsoft Services like Teams or SharePoint Online.
How does Power BI Embedded look like in reality?
Ok, here’s a screenshot of a Power BI report embedded inside a custom application. By custom application I mean an application which is not app.powerbi.com. It can be a plain vanilla website or a WordPress website or can be a heavy application with Reporting and Analytics section.
In the screenshot below, the sections highlighted in red are part of the custom application. The “SALES PERFORMANCE REPORT” or the part highlighted in green is the Power BI report securely embedded in the application.
You can embed a visual, report, dashboard and Q&A. We have used “report” as a general content for embedding. But the description apply to any of the contents.
How can I embed a Power BI report?
There are 3 ways to embed a Power BI report.
- Publish to web. Simplest (and not secure) way of embedding is publishing your Power BI report to web for public access. Note: Anyone with the URL will have access to your report.
- No-code Embedding – Simplest and secure. This approach gives you a secure URL to the Power BI report which you can put in your application. However, this will prompt you for Org authentication.
- Custom Embedding using JavaScript SDK. This gives you full power of embedding capabilities. You can read more about how to embed using JavaScript SDK in our other blog post.
What licensing do I need to support Power BI Embedding?
Now, that’s a tricky question. For embedding you can choose – P SKU, EM SKU or A SKU.
The licensing to go for really depends on your specific scenario. The general answer to choosing the SKU is “where” the content will be consumed.
- Choose A SKU if the Power BI content will be consumed in a custom application
- Choose EM SKU if the Power BI content will be consumed in Teams or SharePoint online (SPO).
- Choose P SKU if the Power BI content will be consumed in a custom application or Teams or SPO.
**You can even choose a P SKU if you are an enterprise or a Large ISV.
The P SKU is an umbrella SKU which not only gives embedding capabilities but additional feature sets including large read users, AI features, and other enterprise features.
Typically, enterprises go with P SKUs.
How are P, EM and A SKUs different in terms of performance?
Here’s a quick summary of each of the SKUs node performance:
So an A4 node is same as a P1 node in terms of performance.
It is generally suggested to start with A1 to test and benchmark your capacities, and then take necessary steps to increase the capacity.
Is Power BI Embedded free to use?
No. For production workloads you have to choose from either of the licensing types. For dev workloads, yes you can embed without purchasing a capacity. However, you may hit the token limits and reports may not render.
Next steps?
If you have any questions on this or want to explore Power BI for your organization, do contact us today.
Quick URLs for further reading
Power BI Embedded Capacity: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/embedded-capacity
Developer Samples: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerBI-Developer-Samples
Power BI Embedded Playground: https://microsoft.github.io/PowerBI-JavaScript/demo/v2-demo/index.html
I hope this post provides some understanding on Power BI Embedded, licensing and consideration for choosing this type of offering.