Get Activity Events API doesn't return activities when activities exist

[Anonymous]

Admin API - Get Activity Events (GET https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/admin/activityevents) doesn't return data when activity data exists in the audit log.

When using "Admin - Get Activity Events" API it doesn't return data for dates in past 90 days 

When using "Get-PowerBIActivityEvents" in Powershell results are returned correctly

Example (The same user has been used and is a Power BI Administrator):

Doesn't return data via API (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/admin/getactivityevents#code-try-0) 

Return data via Powershell for same period:

The API has the same issue that was logged for the Powershell Activity Events which has been subsequently fixed : https://github.com/microsoft/powerbi-powershell/issues/191 

[Anonymous]

After logging with MS Premier Support their investigation found that currently the RestAPI playground doesn’t support the token continuation logic. 

They pointed to blog post that introduced the activity log API: 

“As a general rule, regardless of the number of entries returned, if the results include a continuation token, make sure you call the API again with that token to retrieve the remaining data, until a continuation token is no longer returned. It can happen that a call even returns a continuation token without any event entries. But don’t let the absence of activity events distract you. Just keep calling back with that continuation token. Here is how you can code against the continuation token that is returned in the response”

Source: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-power-bi-activity-log-makes-it-easy-to-download-activit...

As the playground API didn't work as first assumed we have subsequently implemented using continuation tokens within SSIS to retrieve data from the API.

Some observations of how the API works - during testing we used Fiddler and the results were interesting - it appears for the hour periods you are calling it will call as many continuation tokens.  So...

For a 24 hour period (the max the API supports) it will call the API 24 times

For 8am - 8pm it would call 12 times

For 8am to 9:10am it would be called twice

This makes sense why an array returned can be empty and you have to continue calling even though no data is returned it appears to be querying the audit logs for each hour within the parameters passed 

[richbenmintz]

Hi @Anonymous, 

My Observations after much head banging:

- Query a period greater than 1 hour and you will get no events and a continuation token and uri that will repeat itself forever

- Query for a period of 1 hour and life is good

Process then is for each hour in the time horizon run your get until the continuation tokens end

move on to the next hour