Power BI Service: Core Features, Benefits, and Use Cases

You may have heard of Power BI Service during your analysis process without fully understanding what it means. I've prepared this guide to clear any doubts you may have, providing insight into its core features, architecture, and role in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem.

What Is Power BI Service?

Power BI Service is the cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) of the Power BI ecosystem hosted on Azure cloud infrastructure. It allows you to host, manage, and share dashboards and reports. Once you get your report published from Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service enables you to:

• Engage in sharing and collaboration: With Power BI Service, you can share your reports and dashboards to colleagues, different teams, or the entire organization.
• Manage scheduled refreshes: You can schedule automatic updates of datasets from your data source.
• Implement governance and security: You can control access to datasets, reports, and dashboards via a security model.
• Enable access anywhere: You can embed reports and dashboards, making them available to users on any device.

Power BI Service Core Features

Let’s talk about the core features of Power BI Service.

Architectural framework and core components

Power BI Service's architecture combines cloud-based services and an on-premise component, and you can see this through its different layers.

Data integration layer

This layer handles tasks such as connecting to different data sources, transforming data, and preparing it for analysis in the BI phase. Power BI Service allows connections to over 100 different data sources.

Once a dataset is connected, data transformation and cleaning are performed using Power Query, an in-built transformation tool in Power BI. These transformation steps are saved as M scripts to ensure that the same cleaning process is automatically applied whenever new data is loaded.

For datasets stored on local organizational servers, Power BI Service uses the On-premises Data Gateway to securely access on-premises data sources without exposing them to the public internet.

After transformation, the dataset is loaded into Power BI’s xVelocity in-memory engine (VertiPaq), which enables fast query performance and efficient data compression.

Modeling and visualization layer

Once a connection to your dataset is established, you model and structure the data for analysis and visualization. When a report is published from Power BI Desktop, the data model becomes a semantic model (formerly called a dataset) in the Power BI Service. This model is reusable and contains tables, relationships, measures, and calculated columns usually defined using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions).

Power BI provides three storage modes to manage performance and scale:

• Import mode: Dataset is cached in-memory and refreshed on schedule for fast query performance.
• DirectQuery mode: Dataset remains in the source, and queries are sent on demand and is ideal for large datasets.
• Composite mode: Combines Import and DirectQuery, allowing flexible table-level storage configuration.

For pixel-perfect, print-ready outputs, Power BI Service supports paginated reports, created using Power BI Report Builder and then published to the Service. To gain a proper understanding of DAX, read the article Power BI DAX Tutorial for Beginners and Power BI Paginated Reports to understand how to create paginated reports.

Collaboration and distribution framework

In Power BI Service, the collaborative environment for building and managing reports and dashboards is called a Workspace. Every user gets a personal workspace named My Workspace for individual projects.

For team collaboration, you can create Shared Workspaces and assign roles such as Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer to control permissions and access.

Once your work is published and finalized, you can package dashboards and reports into a Power BI App for easy access by a broad audience.

You can also subscribe stakeholders to reports and dashboards, allowing them to receive scheduled emails with report snapshots and links, ensuring they stay updated automatically.

Dashboards and reports

In Power BI, a report and a dashboard have different meanings. 

While a Power BI report is a multi-paged, detailed and in-depth analysis of datasets, it can contain filters, slicers, and various types of visuals for users to explore the dataset from different angles. It can either be created in Power BI Desktop or Power BI Service. 

A Power BI Dashboard, on the other hand, is a single-page, high-level overview of a dataset, used to monitor key metrics and display summary insights at a glance, and is only created in Power BI Service. To have an understanding on how to create a dashboard, the Power BI Dashboard Tutorial will be a good read.

Workspaces

As I mentioned earlier, a Workspace in Power BI Service is the environment where you store, manage, and collaborate on reports and dashboards. It serves as the area where all Power BI contents are stored.

Access is controlled through role-based permissions:

• Admin: Has full control, including managing permissions and deleting the workspace.
• Member: Similar to Admin but cannot update or delete the workspace or manage user roles.
• Contributor: Can create, edit, and publish content, but cannot manage permissions.
• Viewer: Read-only access to view and interact with content.

For effective workspace governance, best practices include using Microsoft Entra security groups instead of individual assignments, separating environments (Dev, Test, Prod), and applying a clear naming convention to keep workspaces organized and avoid clutter.

Power BI Service vs. Power BI Desktop

Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop complement each other, working together to bring life to your datasets. As Power BI Desktop is a Windows application used for developing reports and building models, Power BI Service's primary use case, as I mentioned earlier, is to share, collaborate, and view content. Some differences between the two are:

To get started with Power BI Desktop, the Introduction to Power BI will be a great start. 

Integration with Microsoft 365 Apps

Power BI Service synchronizes seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps, enabling you to integrate analytics within everyday workflows.

It supports connectivity with Excel and OneDrive, allowing you to pull datasets from Excel or CSV files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, with automatic refresh when the source changes.

In Teams, you can embed Power BI reports as tabs so team members can view and comment without leaving the channel. Reports and dashboards can also be embedded into SharePoint Online pages for broader access.

Additionally, Outlook subscriptions deliver report snapshots and links directly to your inbox.

These integrations enhance collaboration and make Power BI content more accessible across the organization.

Reports and Report Lifecycle Management

You can create, view, and edit reports directly in the Service, which is useful when quick changes are needed or when users do not have Power BI Desktop installed. It offers a variety of visualization and formatting options.

Reports can be shared in multiple ways, including direct links, exports to PDF, PowerPoint, or Excel, and scheduled email subscriptions. For public-facing datasets, reports can also be embedded in websites.

Collaboration features include shared workspaces, comments, and bookmarks for guiding users through specific views. While Power BI lacks built-in version control, external tools like Azure DevOps, Git, SharePoint, or OneDrive can support versioning.

Published reports are available through any browser or the Power BI Mobile app, which provides optimized layouts and data alerts for on-the-go access.

To gain a deeper understanding of this concept, exploring the Reports in Power BI would be beneficial.

Licensing Structure and Plans for Power BI Service

Power BI offers different license structures that determine how much you can do in Power BI Service.

Tiered capability access

Power BI Service offers different license types, such as:

• Free: Basic features for your personal use. You can connect to datasets from different sources, create reports, but cannot share content or collaborate.
• Pro: You can collaborate, allows for publishing to different workspaces, enables sharing dashboards and reports with others, and apps.
• Premium Per User (PPU): This combines features from Pro with other Premium capabilities (larger models, paginated reports, AI features) on a user-by-user basis.
• Premium Capacity: Most suitable for Organizations. Any licensed user (even with a Free license) can view content hosted in a Premium Capacity workspace as long as the Viewer role is assigned. You also get an increased dataset size limit, refresh frequency, paginated reports, and AI facilities.

Key differences between the different licenses include whether Free users can view content (only under Premium capacity), higher dataset size limits (10 - 400 GB in Premium compared to 1 GB in Pro), and advanced features like incremental refresh or on-premise connectivity.

Plans, storage, and resource considerations

Power BI workspaces have storage limits. Non-premium workspaces get up to 10 GB, while Premium workspaces offer more capacity. Dataset model sizes also vary; up to 1 GB on Pro and as high as 400 GB on Premium F64.

Power BI is now integrated into Microsoft Fabric, which aligns capacities with Fabric SKUs (FSKUs) and simplifies licensing. Under Fabric, Power BI Free, Pro, and PPU are managed within the same capacity framework.

Premium also enables XMLA endpoints, allowing programmatic read and write access to semantic models through tools like SSMS or Azure Functions.

In summary:

• Choose Pro for smaller teams and cloud collaboration
• Choose Premium (PPU or capacity) for enterprise needs, large models, many users, and advanced features without per-user licensing.

For a more detailed guide on the different Power BI license types, check out our Power BI License Types article.

Specialized Capabilities and Use Cases

Advanced reporting features

As I mentioned earlier, when you need printable, fixed-layout outputs, such as invoices, financial statements, or inventory lists, paginated reports are ideal. They are created in Power BI Report Builder and are usually hosted in Power BI Premium workspaces due to their processing requirements.

For on-premises or hybrid scenarios, Power BI Report Server allows you to host and manage reports on local infrastructure.

Connectivity across environments is supported through the Power BI gateway, which enables cloud reports to query on-premises data sources in real time without moving the data to the cloud.

Real-time analytics framework

Power BI Service supports real-time visualization using streaming datasets. These allow data to be pushed into Power BI through the REST API, Azure Stream Analytics, or PubNub, and displayed instantly on dashboards.

Examples include IoT telemetry, sensor data, or live sales feeds, which can update dashboards in real time as events occur.

To implement this, you create a streaming dataset in the Service and connect it to visuals or pin it as a real-time tile. The REST API also enables programmatic data pushes for monitoring scenarios.  

Augmented intelligence features

Power BI syncs with Azure AI services, allowing you to perform sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, and image analysis through Text Analytics and Vision.

The Q&A feature allows users to ask natural language questions (like “Total sales this quarter by product”), and Power BI automatically generates visuals based on the query, making insights more accessible.

You can also run Python or R scripts in Power BI Desktop or in the Service for Premium workspaces to perform advanced transformations or build custom visuals.

Security and Compliance Architecture

Multi-layered protection framework

Power BI uses Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) for authentication, supporting single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication.

Authorization is handled through workspace roles (Admin, Member, Viewer), app permissions, and Row-Level Security (RLS), which controls data access at the row level based on user identity.

Datasets are encrypted in transit and at rest using TLS and AES-256, with double encryption applied for added security. Premium workspaces also support Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for customer-managed encryption.

The Power BI Admin portal allows administrators to manage access, control sharing and export settings, monitor usage, and configure features to align with organizational governance policies.

Compliance certifications and auditing

Power BI holds certifications like ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and FedRAMP, making it suitable for regulated industries such as healthcare and government.

All activities in Power BI Service are recorded in Microsoft 365 audit logs, providing a complete audit trail to monitor access, track sharing, and investigate potential security issues.

For organizations with data sovereignty requirements, Power BI supports multi-geo deployments, allowing datasets to reside in different geographic regions to meet compliance obligations.

Enterprise Deployment Patterns

For enterprise-scale deployments, managing the lifecycle of Power BI content requires adopting a similar approach to software development (DevOps).

DevOps integration

Power BI Premium supports deployment pipelines (Development → Test → Production) to manage project lifecycles. Workspaces can be assigned to different stages and moved with a single click.

Pipelines also offer REST APIs for automation, allowing full CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) workflows using application identities in Microsoft Entra ID with tools like Azure DevOps.

Governance framework components

Organizations implement governance in Power BI through data cataloging, usage monitoring, certification workflows, and change management. Tools like the Fabric OneLake catalog help label trusted datasets, enabling certified labels on approved content. Usage metrics track who accesses which reports, while change management ensures new datasets and reports meet quality standards before release.

Certification workflows allow organizations to mark datasets and reports as “certified,” ensuring they are reliable for use. Many Power BI Centers of Excellence (CoEs) set naming conventions, workspace policies, and training programs to maintain consistency.

Overall, Power BI content is treated like software in a release cycle, leveraging DevOps pipelines, role-based controls, and governance frameworks to ensure safe and consistent usage.

Mobile experience

The Power BI Mobile App is available on iOS and Android, allowing you to view and interact with dashboards and access insights anytime, anywhere.

Key features include Data Alerts, which notify you when a KPI crosses a set threshold, and Slide Show Mode, which cycles through report pages or bookmarks automatically.

A new Augmented Reality feature lets users pin reports to physical locations; for example, a factory manager can pin a live machine performance report directly on the physical machine so others can view live data overlaid on their camera view.

Power BI also adheres to accessibility standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and EN 301 549, ensuring the app is usable by people with disabilities.

Getting Started with Power BI Service

Now that you know all about Power BI Service, it's time to get started.

First, sign up for an account by navigating to app.powerbi.com in your browser and following the step-by-step process to create a free account. Ensure to sign up using your organizational account as Power BI Service doesn't support consumer email services or telecommunication providers (like outlook.com or gmail.com).

Once you are logged in, you will be welcomed by the primary interface with key areas like:

• Navigation Pane (Left): Enables you to move around the service. It contains links to your Home page, Create, Browse items, Apps, and your Workspaces.
• Microsoft 365 App Launcher (Top Left): Allows you to easily switch to other Microsoft 365 apps like Power Automate and Power Pages.  
• Action Bar (Top Right): It contains several essential icons, including Settings (the gear icon), where you can access the Admin Portal and manage gateways. You'll also find options for Downloads, Help and Support, and your account notifications here.  
• Main Canvas: This central area displays your recommended content, dashboards, and reports.

Power BI Service interface. Image by Author

Our Power BI Data Analyst Associate provides comprehensive documentation to build your skills from beginner to advanced level. Additionally, the Power BI Community forum allows you to ask questions and learn from other users.

Conclusion

I hope you now understand what Power BI Service is and how it helps transform raw data into actionable insights, providing capabilities for data integration, modeling, visualization, and sharing.

For adopting and scaling Power BI in your organization, consider these recommendations: ensure reports meet well-defined business needs, maintain clean datasets and optimized models, establish clear workspace policies, build new reports on existing semantic models when possible, and train team members to keep up with evolving technology.

Our Data Analyst in Power BI track is a great place to start preparing you and your team members for the PL-300 certification. To that end, our How to Pass Microsoft Exam PL-300 guide is a helpful additional resource.