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Mandatory label policy for Power BI

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To help ensure comprehensive protection and governance of sensitive data, you can require your organization's Power BI users to apply sensitivity labels to content they create or edit in Power BI. You do this by enabling, in their sensitivity label policies, a special setting for mandatory labeling in Power BI. This article describes the user actions that are affected by a mandatory labeling policy, and explains how to enable a mandatory labeling policy for Power BI.

Note

The mandatory label policy setting for Power BI is independent of the mandatory label policy setting for files and email.

Mandatory labeling in Power BI isn't supported for service principals and APIs. Service principals and APIs aren't subject to mandatory label policies.

What happens when a mandatory label policy is in effect?

In the Power BI service:

  • Users must apply a sensitivity label before they can save new reports, dashboards, or semantic models.
  • Users must apply a sensitivity label before they can save changes to the settings or content of existing, unlabeled reports and dashboards.
  • If users try to import data from an unlabeled .pbix file, a prompt requires them to select a label before the import can continue. The label they select is applied to the resulting semantic model and report in the service. It's not applied to the .pbix file itself.

In Power BI Desktop:

  • Users must apply sensitivity labels to unlabeled .pbix files before they can save or publish to the service.

Enabling a mandatory label policy for Power BI

A Microsoft 365 administrator can enable a mandatory label policy for Power BI by selecting the Require users to apply a label to their Power BI content checkbox in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. For more information, see What label policies can do.

Screenshot of mandatory label setting in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.

If you have an existing policy, and you want to enable mandatory labeling in Power BI, you can use the Security & Compliance PowerShell setLabelPolicy API.

Set-LabelPolicy -Identity "<policy name>" -AdvancedSettings @{powerbimandatory="true"}

Where:

  • <policy name> is the name of the policy where you want to set labeling in Power BI as mandatory.

Requirements for using PowerShell

Documentation

Considerations and limitations

  • Mandatory labeling in Power BI covers most common scenarios, but there might be some less common flows that still allow a user to create or edit unlabeled content.
  • The mandatory label policy setting for Power BI is independent of the mandatory label policy setting for files and email.
  • Mandatory labeling in Power BI isn't supported for service principals and APIs. Service principals and APIs aren't subject to mandatory label policies.
  • Mandatory labeling in Power BI isn't supported for external guest users (B2B users). B2B users aren't subject to mandatory label policies.

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