Org Deployment and Lockdown
This page is for users and consultants who operate in centrally managed environments (restricted modes, governance, and shared defaults).
Modes (what users experience)
Ask the LLM: “What mode is this MCP server running in, and what does that mean for what we can do?”
User expectation matrix (practical)
| You want to… | Full | Read-only | Browse-only |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connect to a model/dataset | Available | Available | Available |
| Browse schema / search metadata | Available | Available | Available |
| Run DAX queries | Available | Available | Not available |
| Refresh | Available | Available (if enabled) | Not available |
| Edit schema/measures/security | Available | Not available | Not available |
Power BI Service enablement (XMLA)
In some environments, Power BI Service connectivity can be enabled/disabled centrally. If you can’t list/connect to Service datasets, ask:
“Is Service (XMLA) connectivity enabled in this environment? If not, what’s the approved way to enable it?”Central policy (guardrails that can't be bypassed)
Admin policy bundles (locked policy configuration)
Some orgs deploy an admin-owned policy bundle that:
- makes policy rules centrally managed,
- disables local policy edits in the MCP server.
From a user perspective: if the assistant says policy edits are locked, you’ll need an administrator to update the bundle.
Non-interactive deployments
Admins can set MCP_ENGINE_DISABLE_ELICITATION=true to disable interactive confirmation prompts for a server process. In that mode, operations behave as if the client does not support elicitation: some tools can continue with an explicit confirm=true fallback, while prompt-only destructive/admin operations remain blocked.
For policy rules, require_confirm remains best-effort unless admins also configure unsupported confirmations to deny. In locked-down environments, ask whether both disabled prompts and fail-closed policy confirmation are active.