Overview
Cognition360 reports are delivered through Microsoft Power BI. For standard Cognition 360 reporting, the required Microsoft license is Power BI Pro or higher. A paid Microsoft Fabric capacity is not required.
Microsoft Fabric is a separate Microsoft platform and licensing model. Seeing Fabric trial messages, Fabric Free prompts, or a Fabric expiration notice does not by itself mean that a Cognition 360 subscription or report license has changed.
Required licensing for standard Cognition360 reports
To access and interact with Cognition360 reports in the standard Cognition360 workspaces:
- Each report user should have a paid Power BI Pro license, or an eligible higher-tier license that includes the required Power BI functionality.
- Power BI licenses are purchased and managed in the partner’s Microsoft tenant.
Cognition360 does not provide, assign, or manage Power BI licenses. - A paid Fabric capacity is not required for standard Cognition 360 report access.
Power BI Pro licensing remains the baseline requirement even if the tenant has a Fabric Free account or a Fabric trial.
Do I need a Microsoft Fabric license? No. A paid Microsoft Fabric capacity is not required for standard Cognition360 reports. If you see Fabric trial prompts, "Buy Fabric" messages, or Fabric expiration notices in Power BI, these are Microsoft-side events and do not affect your Cognition360 report access. As long as you have a valid Power BI Pro license (or higher), your reports will continue to function normally. |
Power BI and Fabric are different licensing models
Power BI Pro is primarily a per-user license. It grants an individual user access to Power BI content according to the permissions and workspace configuration assigned to that user.
Microsoft Fabric capacity is an organization-level capacity model. It provides shared compute and storage resources for Fabric workloads and may require additional Microsoft licensing or capacity charges.
Fabric trials and expiration notices
A Fabric trial can be enabled in a Microsoft tenant without being required by Cognition360. If a trial expires, standard Cognition360 report access should continue when users still have the required Power BI Pro licensing and appropriate report permissions.
A partner’s Microsoft administrator can review or disable Fabric trial and tenant settings in the Microsoft administration portals. Cognition360 Support has workspace-level access only and cannot change tenant-wide Microsoft licensing settings.
Do not switch Cognition360 workspaces to Fabric without reviewing the impact
Changing a Cognition360 workspace from its standard Power BI configuration to a Fabric capacity can introduce capacity, memory, or sizing constraints. Larger Cognition360 semantic models or reports may fail to refresh when the selected capacity does not have sufficient resources.
For standard Cognition360 reporting, the recommended approach is to keep Cognition360 workspaces on their intended Power BI configuration unless there is a specific Microsoft-driven use case, such as Copilot or another Fabric workload. Any change should be reviewed by the partner’s Microsoft administrator and tested before it is applied broadly.