How to get Views from Power BI Log Analytics?

[catsamson]

Hello,
I am trying to track unique users and average monthly views over the past year accross multiple workspaces and dashboards. I can access the unique users for these using the azure PBI Log Analytics dashboard per the site here: PowerBI-LogAnalytics-Template-Reports/PBIASEngine/README.md at main · microsoft/PowerBI-LogAnalytics... but I can't seem to get actual views? Is this called a SessionInitialize?

Thank you!

[v-denglli-msft]

Hi @catsamson ,

You can use the Usage Metrics report to check the user views of the reports in this workspace.
Monitor report usage metrics - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Best Regards,
Dengliang Li

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[catsamson]

Hi, thanks for your help but I specifically need views from the past 365 days across multiple workspaces and dashboards in one place and the Usage Metrics Report can only give 90 days worth of data.

[lbendlin]

Did you have Log Analytics running on all these workspaces for 365 days? That must be rather expensive.

[catsamson]

It took a while but we also only started tracking it in August so I only have a couple months of data, additionally I filtered the query heavily to only get certain operations. If you have a better idea for getting views for a year please let me know!!!

[lbendlin]

If you have not done that already there is no way to recover this telemetry after the fact.  Personally I would use the tenant audit logs and sacrifice the page views details.

[catsamson]

How do you get tenant audit logs? We'd be fine sacrificing page views.

[lbendlin]

Access the Power BI activity log - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

[catsamson]

Can this be automated? Consulted with someone on my team and they said the tenant logs can't be automatically updated in a PBI dashboard which is what I'm trying to do.

[lbendlin]

yes, we download them daily from the API and store the JSON in a shared location. These JSONs can then be ingested as needed - dataflow or datalake or eventhouse etc.

[catsamson]

Sorry I'm new to this - how do you download them daily from the API automatically?

[lbendlin]

Windows Task Scheduler and PowerShell scripts?  Or whatever API automation tool you prefer.

[catsamson]

Is there a tutorial somewhere for how to do that? I'm surprised its so difficult to get dashboard usage stats for a year and that there's no easy automated way to do it, or no way to filter log analytics to get report views

[lbendlin]

The link I shared goes through the required steps with examples. 

There is no easier (and definitely no cheaper) way of doing this.