Monitor the use of PowerBI across all reports

[neilcotton]

Good day, all.

I wanted to know if there was a way that we could monitor usage (just basic access details) across our all our reports. 

The actual goal is to basically look who is using the service in anyway, not down at the levels of frequency or page level views.

We've only got a dozen workspaces, with maybe 50 reports, so if there was some specific config or report to develop to monitor these collectively, then that's not unsumountable, as long as it's a one off. Alternatively, is there anything built into PBI Service, or even at tenant level to say that the PBIService was consumed by user X, Y, Z.

I know I can look at the last month of usage on a report by report basis, but I want a simple way to see who has accessed what without interogating each of the report usage metrics.

Does anybody have any clever ideas?

Many thanks in advance

  Neil

[Tutu_in_YYC · Accepted solution]

In our org, we collect audit log data and store it in a database (because auditlog data retention is only 90days). With the data, you can create a power bi report to track usage The audit log has alot of info, ie who,where,how,what and contains more operations than just power bi activities. So you might want to filter down to just the relevant activities eg view report, create dataset etc

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

[asnyder]

Have you solved for getting usage at the page-level? From what I've seen this approach would only let you see which reports users access and not the specific pages within those reports. 

Thanks!

[Tutu_in_YYC]

Unfortunately afaik theres no solution yet ie. there is no API to get that information.

The only place you can get page view would be the Usage Metric Reports that you can generate from your report in power bi service, which with a bit of work, you can expand it to all the reports within the same workspace. This semantic model is hidden and cant be accessed, I havent found a way to connect to it. 

[asnyder]

Thanks for your reply.

We've been exploring that route also - setting up RDL files connected to that Usage Metrics Report model and exporting the results of a DAX query into flat files. Not the most scalable as this needs to be done for each workspace.

The problem there is that page-level information has suddenly started to fall off the report. 

This appears to be an issue that others have encountered - See Here

I'm hoping to get more visibility on this issue - seems to me that Microsoft would have provided an out of the box solution for such a fundamental feature. 

[Tutu_in_YYC]

I definitely noticed a few months ago that the Page views and Report Views are somewhat not consistent. So we decided to just focus on activite in the audit log and lose the page views information (although this could be really useful in some cases).

[asnyder]

Makes sense - I think Microsoft is dropping the ball here. Detailed usage reporting should be a standard and easy to use feature. 

Feel free to upvote my post below, hoping to get more attention on this for the benefit of all PowerBI users. 

https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Service/PowerBI-Usage-By-Report-Page/m-p/4586766#M267229

[neilcotton]

Thanks Tutu. That is some great information. I'll look into that. Many thanks.

[Tutu_in_YYC]

The data is great for auditing too