API - ActivityEvents returns duplicate/excess logs

[BM4291]

Hi,

We've started using the Activity Events API to build up a better understanding of usage across our organisation; currently the focus is on report views so specifically filtering down to that.

I've been monitoring the daily load and a couple of outliers have popped up whereby the data tells me a user has accessed a report ~400 times per day. Not only that, the views are all within seconds of each other, and on speaking with the user, they're not aware of any network issues other than the Power BI service feeling 'slow'... I can't see anything on the capacity metrics to suggest they were particularly active during this period, or whether there were any issues.

Has anyone else experienced this before? I've not found anything on the forum or elsewhere online.

Below is an example of the data when I bring it into SQL from the following call: https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/admin/activityevents?startDateTime='2022-10-20T08:00:00.000Z'&end... eq 'ViewReport'

[BM4291]

Thanks @lbendlin,

I've had a look at the three separate reports that have flagged this issue and each of them use DirectQuery, as for the number of visuals, I'm not sure what would be classed as excessive? One of the reports has what I'd say is quite a lot (20+) whereas another has 5.

The majority of our reports are linked via DirectQuery but have only seen this flag up on two days (since 1st October) and for two users, is there a known issue, or something I should be proactively filtering out for these views?

[lbendlin]

In my opinion anything more than 10 visuals on a page is excessive.  See if you can combine some of them via small multiples, and drop others that do not provide value.

Keep doing what you are doing - good monitoring is a very important part of keeping your Power BI environment healthy.

[BM4291]

Thanks @lbendlin, I'll flag it back to the report owner to assess however not sure why the presence of more visuals would randomly appear as hundreds of duplicate report views, other users have accessed the same reports without this behaviour so assuming this is a bug in the API?

[lbendlin]

can you trace it back to the IP address of the report user?  Maybe one user had the page open and then their cat was sitting on the F5 key.

[BM4291]

@lbendlin ... Cat on laptop was my first suggestion but the user said no!

Checked the IP and that's static but we have a corporate VPN so not sure how meaningful that'd be unless she happend to have a serious network issue but she was pretty clear that nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

[lbendlin]

Well, keep monitoring and see if you can catch it next time it happens. If you have a Pro license you can consider raising a Pro ticket at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/support/pro/

[BM4291 · Accepted solution]

Have raised with Microsoft and turns out it is a known issue which is being investigated by the dev team; it's in their hands now.

[lbendlin]

Is the report dataset's data source in Direct Query mode?  Does the report have an excessive number of visuals on each page?