How to authenticate automated app that pushes data to Power BI

Question

I have an application running on a server on our enterprise network. I have modified it to push data to Power BI (cloud) through the REST API. The application is automated and has no user interaction.

What is the best way to authenticate it? Currently I have given it my own user and password and placed it in the source code.

I don't like that solution, but is there a better way? Creating an Azure AD account for just this purpose also does not seem right.

The docs mention this:

Application permissions: Your client application needs to access the web API directly as itself (no user context). This type of permission requires administrator consent and is also not available for native client applications.

I guess I cannot use this method because the application falls in the "native client" category, or..?

Answer 1

You can access the web API using the application's identity and presenting the application ID, credential(password or Certificate) for Azure AD authentication. This scenario is documented here . You can also get code samples for a daemon app at Daemon applications (accessing Web APIs with the application's identity)