Integrating CA PPM Data Warehouse security with Power BI RLS

Background

Tumble Road has partnered with CA Technologies over the last year, to make their reporting more Power BI friendly. At CA World 17, we helped introduce the new OData connector to the CA PPM Data Warehouse to attendees.

The CA Need

The CA PPM Data Warehouse (DWH) has very rich security support at the user level and at the role level. However, when the OData connector was originally in beta, a need to replicate this security functionality within Power BI was noted. If we were not able to have Power BI consume the CA PPM DWH security model, this would make Power BI a non-starter for many companies.

The Power BI Solution

Row Level Security within Power BI was the answer to carrying forward the DWH security model. Power BI enables filtering of data based on the current Azure Active Directory (AAD) User ID. Since all Power BI users have to have an AAD User ID, part of the solution was at hand.

The CA PPM DWH has a security table that lists every entity for which a user can access. This information is used by Power BI to security the data.

However, CA’s solution does not use AAD so a mapping exercise may be needed between the CA User Name and the Microsoft User ID. The video below shows a very simple case where we are able to append the Office 365 domain name to the CA User Name to get the requisite AAD User ID.

Your particular situation may require a more extensive mapping exercise. Elaborate mappings can be done in Excel and imported into the model. This imported mapping data can be used with the Security table to implement the requisite information.

The Presentation

In the video below, I show you how to bring the Security table from the Data Warehouse into Power BI and use the data as a basis for applying Row Level Security within Power BI. This should restrict the data to only that that the person is authorized.