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BI Pixie Workload in Microsoft Fabric
Generally Available

Add BI Pixie to Your Tenant

This page is for Microsoft Fabric tenant administrators. It walks you through enabling BI Pixie in Microsoft Fabric in your tenant so that workspace users can create BI Pixie items inside their Fabric workspaces. Once BI Pixie is enabled, it appears under + New item in each workspace, alongside lakehouses, semantic models, and reports.

A tenant administrator adds BI Pixie once per tenant. After BI Pixie is added, your users do not need any further setup. They can create BI Pixie items directly from any workspace they have access to.

Before You Start

  • You must be a Fabric administrator. Power Platform administrators and Microsoft 365 Global administrators are implicitly Fabric administrators too.
  • Your tenant must have at least one paid Fabric capacity (any SKU) or an active Fabric trial.
  • You should know which capacities or workspaces you want BI Pixie scoped to.

Step 1: Confirm that no tenant setting is needed

BI Pixie is generally available in the Workload Hub to every Fabric tenant, and no access request is needed. As a tenant admin, you can add it with the standard Workload Hub permissions and no special tenant setting.

Note. Earlier, during BI Pixie's public preview, adding the workload required the Users can see and work with additional workloads not validated by Microsoft tenant setting to be on. Now that BI Pixie is generally available, that setting is no longer needed. For background on Workload Hub tenant settings, see Microsoft Learn: Set up your environment.

Step 2: Open the Workload Hub

  1. Go to the Microsoft Fabric portal at app.fabric.microsoft.com and sign in with your admin account.
  2. In the left navigation, select Workload Hub. (If you do not see Workload Hub, switch to a workspace first or open Settings > Admin portal and verify that workloads are enabled for your tenant.)
  3. The Workload Hub lists all available workloads, including Microsoft-built and partner-built workloads.

Step 3: Find BI Pixie

  1. In the Workload Hub gallery, search for BI Pixie, or open the BI Pixie page in the Workload Hub directly.
  2. Select the BI Pixie tile to open its details page. You will see the publisher (DataChant), the description, screenshots, and a link to terms and privacy.
  3. Review the listed permissions BI Pixie requires. Permissions and Data Access lists every one of them with the reason it is needed, explains why two BI Pixie applications appear in your tenant, and states what BI Pixie reads, writes and stores. That page is written to be forwarded to a security reviewer on its own.
  4. The mandatory Fabric.Extend scope is the standard dependency Microsoft requires of every Fabric workload (see workload publishing requirements). It lets the workload run inside Fabric and call Fabric APIs on behalf of the signed-in user.
  5. Confirm the tile shows the Add to Tenant button. As a Fabric administrator, you can make BI Pixie available across your entire tenant in one action. Capacity admins see Add to Capacity and workspace admins see Add to Workspace instead. Tenant-level assignment is reserved for tenant administrators per Microsoft's How to consume workloads guide.

Step 4: Add BI Pixie to Your Tenant

  1. Select Add to Tenant (or Get) on the BI Pixie details page.
  2. BI Pixie then appears in your tenant's added workloads list, and the button changes from Add to Tenant to Manage.

Adding BI Pixie in the Workload Hub is the only approval that BI Pixie itself asks for. Whether a person can consent to the Microsoft permissions BI Pixie requests for themselves depends on your organization's consent policy. Where the policy allows it, each person consents to them the first time they open BI Pixie.

Your own organization may add a second approval. If your organization requires an administrator to approve applications in Microsoft Entra ID, the first person to open BI Pixie sees Microsoft's "Need admin approval" or "Approval required" screen. In that case a Microsoft Entra administrator approves the BI Pixie applications, through whatever process your organization uses for that. Approve BI Pixie in Your Organization describes the choices that administrator has. The Who approves what section of Permissions and Data Access explains both approvals and lists each BI Pixie application, so that page is the one to send to whoever approves applications in your organization.

Step 5: Set the Distribution Scope

Microsoft Fabric lets you assign a workload at three levels: the entire tenant, specific capacities, or specific workspaces. Choose the level that matches how broadly you want BI Pixie available.

  • Add to tenant (tenant admins): BI Pixie is available to every workspace in the tenant that runs on a Fabric capacity.
  • Add to capacity (capacity admins): BI Pixie is available under + New item only in workspaces assigned to the listed capacities.
  • Add to workspace (workspace admins): BI Pixie is available only in the listed workspaces. This level is useful for a pilot before a wider rollout.

All three options are managed from the same Workload Hub UI. The button label on the BI Pixie tile changes to match your role: Add to Tenant, Add to Capacity, or Add to Workspace.

If you want to restrict who across the tenant can add or use partner workloads at all, review the Additional workloads tenant settings under Settings > Admin portal > Tenant settings. The relevant switches are Capacity admins and contributors can add and remove additional workloads and Workspace admins can add and remove additional workloads. These settings apply across all partner workloads and are not BI Pixie-specific.

Step 6: Verify BI Pixie Was Added

Confirm that BI Pixie is reachable from a normal user account before you announce it to your team.

  1. Switch to a regular Fabric user account (or use a private browser window) and sign in to app.fabric.microsoft.com.
  2. Open any workspace backed by a Fabric capacity that is in scope for the workload.
  3. Select + New item at the top of the workspace.
  4. In the create catalog, search for BI Pixie. You should see BI Pixie as a creatable item.

If the BI Pixie item appears, BI Pixie is added and ready to use. Creating a BI Pixie item is a workspace-level task for the report owner, so you do not need to create one yourself. See Create a BI Pixie item for the user-facing flow.

Troubleshooting

The BI Pixie item does not appear under + New item

  • Workspace is not on a Fabric capacity. Workloads only run on Fabric capacities (paid SKU or trial). Confirm the workspace is assigned to a capacity in Workspace settings > License info.
  • Assignment scope excludes this workspace. Re-check Step 5. If you used Add to capacity or Add to workspace, the user's workspace must be in the assigned set.
  • Propagation delay. Fabric can take some time to apply a distribution change in every region, and Microsoft does not publish how long. If you changed the distribution recently, refresh the workspace after a short wait.
  • Browser cache. Sign out of Fabric, clear site data for app.fabric.microsoft.com, and sign back in.

People see "Need admin approval" or "Approval required" when they open BI Pixie

The "Need admin approval" and "Approval required" messages come from your own Microsoft Entra ID policy, not from BI Pixie. They appear when your organization requires an administrator to approve the BI Pixie applications, so a person cannot consent to them for themselves.

  • Send the Who approves what section of Permissions and Data Access to whoever approves applications in your organization. It lists each BI Pixie application with its ID and every permission it requests.
  • Send Approve BI Pixie in Your Organization to the Microsoft Entra administrator. It describes how to approve BI Pixie for everyone, for named people, or let people approve it for themselves.
  • If your organization uses the Microsoft Entra admin consent workflow, the person who saw the message can request approval from that screen, and the request waits under Enterprise apps > Activity > Admin consent requests.
  • After the approval, the person opens the BI Pixie item again. Nothing needs to be repeated in the Workload Hub.

Conditional Access blocks the workload

If your tenant has a Conditional Access policy that requires app protection or compliant devices, ensure BI Pixie is included as an approved cloud app or scope your policy to exclude the BI Pixie service principals. BI Pixie uses two Microsoft Entra applications, one for the user interface and one for the lifecycle calls Fabric makes. A third, BI Pixie Delivery, appears only if somebody turns on data residency. All of them are listed with their application IDs on Permissions and Data Access.

Private Link tenants

Microsoft Fabric does not run external workloads in tenants that have Private Link enforcement enabled. If Private Link is a hard requirement for your environment, contact us.

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