Calling the Microsoft Fabric REST API from a standard Python notebook (service principal) without semantic-link auth errors

When you deploy and run Fabric items with a service principal (recommended for ownership and automation), the notebook “submitter” becomes the service principal. That’s great for governance, but it can surface confusing 401/403 errors when using semantic-link (sempy), especially in the default standard Python notebook environment.

This post explains why it happens and how to fix it cleanly.

Prerequisites / assumptions

• Your service principal has at least Contributor on the target Fabric workspace.
• Tenant setting Service principals can use Fabric APIs is enabled.
• You are running a standard Python notebook in Fabric (not a custom environment you fully control).

What I was encountering

In my case I am using the semantic-link library to dynamically get the Fabric workspace id and the id of my warehouse using following code in a Python notebook:

import sempy.fabric as fabric

warehouse_id = fabric.resolve_item_id("dwh", type="Warehouse")
workspace_id = fabric.get_workspace_id()

But when the notebook is executed under a service principal, you may see errors like:

FabricHTTPException: 401 Unauthorized for url: https://api.powerbi.com/powerbi/globalservice/v201606/clusterdetails Headers: {‘Cache-Control’: ‘no-store, must-revalidate, no-cache’, ‘Pragma’: ‘no-cache’, >’Transfer-Encoding’: ‘chunked’, ‘Content-Type’: ‘application/octet-stream’, >’Strict-Transport-Security’: ‘max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains’, ‘X-Frame-Options’: >’deny’, ‘X-Content-Type-Options’: ‘nosniff’, ‘RequestId’: >’539afdb7-588b-4132-8175-aab68f3e0bc7’, ‘Access-Control-Expose-Headers’: ‘RequestId’, >’Date’: ‘Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:07:29 GMT’}

Or like this:

FabricHTTPException: 403 Forbidden for url: https://wabi-west-europe-redirect.analysis.windows.net/v1.0/myorg/groups?$filter=name%20eq%20’uuid’ Headers: {‘Content-Length’: ‘0’, ‘Strict-Transport-Security’: ‘max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains’, ‘X-Frame-Options’: ‘deny’, ‘X-Content-Type-Options’: ‘nosniff’, ‘Access-Control-Expose-Headers’: ‘RequestId’, ‘RequestId’: ‘id’, ‘Date’: ‘Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:19:19 GMT’}

So even though the service principal has a Contributor role on the workspace and the Fabric settings Service principals can use Fabric APIs is enabled the library is still complaining it is unauthorized.

Problem 1: semantic-link uses Power BI endpoints (scope mismatch)

Even though the intent is to access the Fabric API, some semantic-link versions still route part of the discovery / workspace resolution through Power BI APIs (notably the /groups endpoint).

When Fabric runs a notebook triggered by a service principal, the provided access token is typically scoped for Fabric, e.g.:

https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/.default

But those Power BI APIs calls require:

https://analysis.windows.net/powerbi/api/.default

So the call succeeds for Fabric endpoints but fails for Power BI endpoints — resulting in 401/403 even though your permissions look correct.

Solution 1: upgrade the semantic-link package in the notebook environment

Default Python notebooks come with a default environment where in this case a version of semantic-link is installed. However this is an old version of the package.

The issue we are encountering has already been resolved in versions of semantic-link > 0.12.

So if you want to avoid this issue you can just install the latest version (or a pinned version > 0.12) of the semantic-link package in your notebook environment.

!pip install -U semantic-link

Tip: If you want deterministic builds, pin an exact version that you validated (e.g. semantic-link==0.13.0), rather than always upgrading.

Problem 2: annoying warning on sempy import

Even after upgrading you still see a warning when importing the semantic-link package:

import sempy.fabric as fabric

gives the following warning:

Failed to fetch cluster details Traceback (most recent call last): File “….. Something about python 3.11 synapse ml fabric service_discovery.py” …. Exception: Fetch cluster details returns 401:b’ ‘ ## Not In PBI Synapse Platform ##

This usually happens during import because importing the submodule can trigger “service discovery” logic (depending on the version and environment). It’s often non-fatal, but it’s noisy and makes runs look broken.

Solution 2: explicit imports

Under the Zen of Python motto “explicit is better than implicit import only the specific functions/classes you actually use:

from sempy.fabric import resolve_item_id, get_workspace_id, FabricRestClient

Summary

• 401/403 happens because older semantic-link code may call Power BI APIs (/groups) while Fabric provides a token scoped for Fabric APIs.
• Fix it by upgrading semantic-link (e.g. >= 0.12).
• If you’re seeing noisy “cluster details” warnings, prefer explicit imports over implicit ones.