How to govern Sprawl in Power BI
A step-by-step guide to governing Sprawl in Power BI with Rencore: detect, review by owner and severity, and remediate with an audit trail.
Governing Sprawl in Power BI means finding where it goes wrong, reviewing the findings by owner and severity, and remediating with an audit trail. Rencore covers this concern for Power BI with the pre-built controls below, so it becomes a repeatable check rather than a one-off cleanup. The steps that follow apply the same detect, review, remediate loop to Sprawl.
Steps
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Inventory Power BI
Connect Power BI and let Rencore build a continuous inventory of its resources, owners, and configuration, so governance starts from what exists rather than a stale export.
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Detect with policies
Turn on the pre-built policies that cover Sprawl in Power BI to surface oversharing, sprawl, and misconfiguration on the first scan, before writing a single custom rule.
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Review by owner and severity
Use the Power BI reports to review findings by owner, category, and severity, and to share them with stakeholders who do not have a seat in the platform.
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Remediate and automate
Apply automations to fix findings at scale, route sensitive changes through approvals, and keep every action reversible and logged for the audit trail.
Power BI controls for Sprawl
Grounded in the Rencore catalog. See the full Power BI catalog on the Power BI connector page.
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Empty Workspace Cleanup Alert
Identifies unused workspace containers that should be removed to maintain environment cleanliness
Severity: Medium -
Inactive Power BI Content Alert
Identifies all unused content types for possible archiving or removal to improve environment efficiency
Severity: Medium -
Inactive Power BI Reports
Identifies specifically reports without recent activity for review and potential archiving
Severity: Medium -
Inactive Power BI Workspaces
Identifies workspaces without user activity that may be candidates for archiving or consolidation (30 days)
Severity: Medium -
Orphaned Power BI Datasets
Identifies datasets not connected to any reports that may be consuming resources unnecessarily
Severity: Medium -
Resource Utilization Analysis
Comprehensive view of unused artifacts by type to support cleanup initiatives and resource optimization
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Quarterly Access Review for PowerBI Workspaces
Runs every quarter a permission review for PowerBI workspaces
