Visual usage patterns

[cognovo]

For the check of cost effectiveness we would like to track visual usage patterns in reports throughout our organisation.

Is there any way to gather information about all reports throughout the organsation and list the used visuals and visual types in it ?

In case not, I already have posted a new idea here, pls vote for it if you think this one could be useful:

Microsoft Idea (powerbi.com)

We use Power BI Premium.

Best regards

Michael

[cognovo]

Hi Ibendlin,

we have organizational custom visuals we pay for and we want to know if they are worth the money. If nonbody uses them we waste money 🙂 So statistics about usage of visuals would greatly help us.

[lbendlin]

I mentioned in another post that there is a very crude way of doing that:

- make yourself member of all premium workspaces

- download all pbix files from all datasets that allow it

- open the pbix with 7Zip, and look in the Reports/Custom Visuals subfolder.

Very crude, very slow, and will not work for personal workspaces or any datasets that have incremental refresh or other limitations.

I have a powershell script for that if you are interested.

[cognovo · Accepted solution]

Hi Ibendlin,

yes we already thought about that possbility but it's too crude. We have thousands of reports here and we cannot make ourselves member of every workspace (technically not a problem but for security reasons not allowed).

So please vote for my idea about extending the Power BI Rest Api with a Get Visual endpoint:

Microsoft Idea (powerbi.com)

[lbendlin]

"For the check of cost effectiveness we would like to track visual usage patterns"

Please explain how these two are related. In a Premium environment you should anyhow have disabled the use of paid custom visuals, and restricted the use of free custom visuals to the certified ones.