Forum Discussion
Power BI user activity log (applied filters)
We have a necessity to track useractivities across apps, reports and and report pages and the specific filters applied to send/retrieve quesries/results.
A scenario that i think explains the requirement is:
"A company is selling burgers to customers. The employee of the month is the employee that had the most sales. Employee A opens a Power BI App that shows the sales completed by all employees. In the report there exists a filter with employee names - Employee A selects the employee filter and checks his/her own name to see number of completed sales for the selected period.
Employee A is courios to see how many sales his/her co-worker Employee B has completed for the period. Hence Employee A deselect him/herself and selects Employee B."
Problem: The manager would like to know following
- Have employee A used the Employee filter to check his/her own sales for the period?
- Have employee A used the Employee filter to check other employees sales for the period?
In short: the manager wants to track user activities on different granular levels - report opens, filter applied, etc.
Maybe i could use Power BI REST API and retrieve audit logs? Maybe Microsoft Purview could be a solution?
I really hope that some of you can and want to help me solving this problem!
3 Replies
The advanced audit logging that they once promised has not materialized yet. All we have so far is this : Track user activities in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn . Note: does not include page or visual level tracking.
This one is also worth reading : Track user activities in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Thank you for your answer.
Is there any other way to track the informartion? I mean if the normal activity and audit logging isn't advanced enough atm, then maybe bringing your own can solve the problem? see Power BI security white paper - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
The requirements you describe are more applicable to forensics events. If you suspect data leakage/exposure (for example through faulty RLS) you can request a special ticket with Microsoft, allow them to decrypt your detail logs and conduct the forensics. But that is limited to specific situations, takes a long time and is not scalable.
