Power BI Usage Statistics

[mchapman]

As I am not an admin of my companies O365 account I am not able to access the power BI usage logs and the admin has said there isn't a way to get them in an automated fashion.  Therefore I built an extended event trace to capture usage information complements of the google. 

I'm seeing straight up queries of when a user manually refreshes the dashboard on their phone from the trace logs with xml tag "applicationname" = 'PowerBI'.  I'm pulling the "effectiveusername" out of the request properties xml tag, after shredding the xml in sql.  I'm not seeing as many queries as I would expect so I dug a little  more and found trace events with this value in the "ApplicationName" tag "PowerBI - Model Change Tracker - Id 1390485 - Last Check 10/27/2016 09:27:08" with changing id's and dates respectively. This is query that is sent with this trace log: "select [ROLES] from $system.dbschema_catalogs where ([CATALOG_NAME]=@p1)" My suspicion is that the dashboards are periodically updated on the backend by powerbi and the Model Change Tracker log comes from when the end user opens the dashboard but doesn't manually refresh it as this query just checked their level of access.  I would like to confirm wether this assumption is true so I can make sure my usage numbers are the most accurate.

So does the log with "Application Name" like "PowerBI - Model Change Tracker " represent true usage by an end user or is it an automated periodic request that happens wether the user is actvively viewing the dashboard or not?

[v-sihou-msft · Accepted solution]

@mchapman

The automatic data refresh is hourly/daily. It's not executed when an end user access the dashboard. So it should be the true usage of the user. Also the Usage Reporting is already released for Admin, you can get more accurate information from that. Please vote the leave comment in this idea for more improvement. It has similar feature request like dedicate permission for "non admin" users to view Usage information, please also vote this idea as well.

Regards,

[sivass]

Hi Team,

We are also capturing all traces from xEvents Analysis services traces and found that lots of time Power BI Engine executes auto refresh queries for all users and we could not identify true usage. Could you please let us know any way to identify query from Power BI engine and user. EffectiveUserName from request properties gives user aliases only.

Thanks,

Siva

[mchapman]

Thanks for the reply, I will include that trace log as part of my usage statistics.  The existing usage stats in Power BI don't work for my needs for a couple of reasons.  One: I am not an admin and can't view them without involving the admin.  Two: my need is to build usage statistics for managers so that as managers in other groups roll out Power BI dashboards they can get a sense for usage.  This should assist in determining if what's being delivered is what was needed.  The assumption being that if the dashboards aren't being used then it's not meeting the need it was designed for.