Identifying App name within Audit Logs

[Astro]

Hello,

We have created several Power BI Apps for distinct parts of our organisation. We would like to create Power BI reports which allow senior executives (the App owner from a business perspective) to see who is viewing reports within their apps. We have extracted Power BI data from the Security and Compliance Centre.

Our intention is to use the audit log data as the source for a Power BI report which will allows users to monitor usage of reports\dashboards within their app.  However, there doesn't appear to be anything in the log which allows us to filter by App. There nearest available data item appears to be WorkSpaceName but most of our users views appear under "My Workspace" even though they're accessing the report via an App. So we cannot filter the data and if there is a duplicate report name across apps there doesn't appear to be an obvious way to differentiate that in the log data.

Is there anything we can do to restrict the data to an App or is there any update coming which will allow us to do so?

I hope that makes sense

Thanks

Nick

[v-jiascu-msft]

@Astro,

Hi Nick,

I tested it. It's hard to recognize an App workspace name. The workaround could be recognizing it by ObjectId and DatasetName. It's a good idea to restrict the access at the first place. Publish the App only to the authorised users. Please vote on this idea or crate a new one: power-bi-global-admin.

Best Regards!

Dale

[Astro]

Thanks for your reply Dale,

The Apps are published to authorised users via the app publication process.

The point is, the business owners of the apps would like to be able to know definitively who is viewing each report in their app and how often. They can then use that information to challenge employees on operational performance.  It makes sense that if a user clicks on the "Sales Area One App" and another clicks on the "Sales Area Two App" that should be recorded in the log. We should be able to extract the log and put a pbix on top of that with a filter on "App Name".

The App workspace name would not work. When an authorised app user views a report via an app the audit log does not list the app workspace. It lists "My workspace".

Using the ObjectId or Dataset name would mean changing the reporting pbix every time a new dataset or report\dashboard is published in order to map App Name to dataset\Objectid. Also, with many apps there's a high likelyhood of reports and datasets with the same name across the tenancy. 

Perhaps I will raise an idea for this. It seems an oversight that MS have created the ability to package reports in Apps but no way of reporting usage metrics for that app. A separate oversight is the lack of "user name" in the log. There's only email address which isn't always easy to interpret so doesn't make a great slicer in pbix. But that's another issue 😞

Nick