How to monitor whether a PowerBI Pro license is really used?

[debiesven]

Hi,

We have around 500 PowerBI Pro licenses assigned to users at this moment. But how many of those really use PowerBI? Is there a way how we can see whether the PowerBI Pro license is really "used" in a certain period? This is not only for PowerBI Pro, but also applies for other Microsoft subscriptions. So basically for each user-subscription combination: Is this subscription/license used in the given period? This way we should be able to free up unused licenses.

[Anonymous]

We export all our audit data to create a datawarehouse and enable reporting on the usage of Power BI. You don't have to export all the data. You do have to ability to filter for specific activities e.g. you want to see if your developers are creating content and publishing. 

If you only have Pro licenses and not Premium Capacity as well, you will need to export as much audit data as you can to see what your users are doing with those Pro licenses.If there is no activity for a set amount of time, you can also automate the removal of their Pro license. We did this by granting the Pro license with a Security Group in Azure and running a script to remove the users.

[Anonymous]

Hi @debiesven You can use the REST API and the Audit logs to monitor and track the user usage. 

Track user activities in Power BI

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-auditing 

A good way to do this is to export the logs on a daily basis to build up history of your audit data as the Audit logs only have 90 days of data. 

[debiesven]

If I understand correct, you mean getting al the usage of all reports (or applications) and then get all the users that have used the reports/applications and based on that we can see who still uses it and who doesn't? Do I undersand that correctly?