Include Analyze in Excel and XMLA queries in Usage Metrics for semantic models

Until usage metrics cover direct model access, there are a few places that can show who is querying a semantic model from Excel or other XMLA clients. These are pointers from the documented monitoring options; availability depends on your license and tenant settings.

• Power BI activity log: events for external-tool access to a model can be pulled with the admin cmdlet and filtered by activity type.
• Workspace monitoring or Azure Log Analytics integration: semantic model query events include the client application name, so Excel and other XMLA tools can be told apart from report queries.
• Capacity Metrics app: shows which models drive load on the capacity, even though it does not name the client.

# Requires Power BI admin rights
Connect-PowerBIServiceAccount
Get-PowerBIActivityEvent -StartDateTime "2026-10-01T00:00:00" -EndDateTime "2026-10-01T23:59:59" -ResultType JsonString |
  ConvertFrom-Json |
  Where-Object { $_.Activity -like "*Analyze*" } |
  Select-Object UserId, Activity, DatasetName, CreationTime

The activity name can differ by tenant and API version, so it is worth listing distinct values of the Activity field first.

So my overall approach would be:

Who  -> activity log filtered to Analyze / external application events
What -> workspace monitoring query events grouped by application name
Load -> Capacity Metrics app for the heaviest models

AI-assisted drafting: AI was used to help structure and phrase this response. I reviewed and validated the technical content before posting.