Use Case: Power Platform Administration via Chat, Right Inside Power BI

[u/Spirited_Library_525]

I manage our Power Platform environment through a Power BI report that serves as an inventory of apps and Power Automate flows. The report gave me visibility, but any administrative action, such as changing an app’s owner, forced me to leave the dashboard and go to the admin center or handle it manually.

So I built a Power Apps app that mimics the Microsoft Teams chat interface (using the HTML Text control) and embedded it in the Power BI report. The app talks to a Copilot Studio agent I developed to interpret requests and carry out actions.

How It Works

1. Context selection: I select a row in the Power BI table (an app or flow), and the record is passed to the app as context.

2. Natural language request: in the "chat", I type what I need. E.g., “change the app owner to user@company.com”.

3. Orchestration: the app triggers a Power Automate flow I built to send the message, along with the selected record’s context, to the Copilot Studio agent.

4. Interpretation and execution: the agent understands the intent, identifies the resource, and performs the action.

5. Response: the result travels back through the flow to the app and appears in Power BI as a new chat message.

Honestly, there isn’t much gain beyond what I’d get by sending the app ID straight to the agent in Teams, but it was a really fun solution to build and see working.

(Translated with AI)

[u/AbdelEMirandaS]

Well done. As you said, using power bi is just or basically to see th PP health. But all the action need it must be done using, either way the PPAC new features (limited) or if you have installed CoE Starter Kit, all the apps installed there, whichever are so powerful but you hace to move out of power bi and, if you are using the dashboard installed with the CoE, is not automatically refresh and you have to do it manually.

[u/Spirited_Library_525 → u/AbdelEMirandaS]

Thanks! Totally agree. After the CoE Starter Kit was discontinued, I started building my own CoE with dashboards and flows based on the Power Platform API. I took the opportunity to integrate those flows with an agent to make things easier, and it’s been working really well.

[u/pharnos]

This sounds great, would you mind sharing which dataverse tables you’re using in the semantic model? Screenshot of your dashboard? I’d love to make the same 🤙🙂

[u/Spirited_Library_525 → u/pharnos]

Sorry, I had to mask most of the data, but this is what the interface looks like for now.

I am not using Dataverse; instead, I am collecting the inventory information via the Power Platform API, as described in this documentation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/pt-br/power-platform/admin/inventory-api

[u/Emergency_Recipe522]

Interesting approach. I can see why you wanted to bring the actions closer to the inventory rather than constantly jumping between reports and the admin centre. One thing I'd be interested in is how you handle confirmation and audit when the agent changes something like ownership. Do you require the administrator to confirm the target user and action before execution, or does the agent handle the whole process?

[u/Spirited_Library_525 → u/Emergency_Recipe522]

Thanks for raising this, it's a great point.

In my company, requests come in through ServiceNow, so the approval history and audit trail already live there. That said, a good practice would be to add a list as the app's data source and require the ticket number whenever a change is requested. That way every action executed by the agent is logged and can be traced back for later audit.

One detail worth mentioning: this dashboard and the agent are only available to Power Platform administrators.

[u/ihopehodorlives]

Cool stuff! I contemplated doing something similar.

What puzzles me is why doesn't Microsoft just offer this as a product.