Usage Metrics for Dashboard/Report Authors Feedback

[sirui_sun]

Hello everyone!

Please use this thread to leave feedback or questions about our new usage metrics feature for dashboard/report authors.

Update [10/5/2017]: we have successfully rolled out a batch of performance optimizations to the usage metrics feature! You should now see your usage metrics reports loading much more quickly. You should also no longer see the "ran out of resources" error on your visuals. Please let us know if you're seeing otherwise.

Update [8/30/2017]: we're rolling out updates to usage metrics to surface the names of the users who are viewing and sharing dashboards and reports! The rollout will complete by end of the week. See our blog post for more information!

Before we start, be sure to check out the documentation for more information about the feature.

Note also that we’ve created the following UserVoice items for improvements already on the backlog. Please cast your vote below to help us prioritize our investments going forward.

• Usage metrics show the exact e-mail address/names of users who access dashboards/reports [Done!]
• Dataset usage metrics for content creators
• Usage metrics for Power BI apps
• Usage metrics retains data for >90 days
• Improve usage metrics report performance [Done!]
• Usage metrics programmatic access
• Admins can control which users' identities are picked up by usage metrics

Looking forward to hearing from you,

-Sirui

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous the usage metric has never been available for the new workspaces. Its a future feature.

[Anonymous]

Cool, now we also need to see usernames

Thanks

[zthill]

We have developed an automated method of pulling the O365 Power BI audit logs.  When I evaluate the logs for ViewReport or ViewDashboard for a specific report or dashboard, the numbers don't align with the usage metrics.  I am consistently seeing higher unique user and view counts in the usage metrics compared to the audit logs.  Can you explain the discrepancy?  Which are more accurate?

[Anonymous]

@zthill

Hey there! I'm currently looking into how to pull the logs automatically, but I'm just at the beginning. Can you share how you automatically pull the data from Power BI? That would be really helpful!

Many thanks ahead, Chris

[zthill]

FYI - we followed the information provided here:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-auditing/

We have a PowerShell script that executes on a scheduler job daily to extract the Power BI audit log records and writes them to a file on a shared folder where they are picked up for processing.  Note, sometimes it takes more than 24 hours before the audit data is available so we had to code around this to allow for a flexible lag.

We then wrote a custom Power BI report that joins the account information pulled from these audit logs to internal data sources so we can show data at multiple levels to track usage and adoption - by department, by title, etc.

[MaartenJ]

@sirui_sun The Report Usage Metrics Report fails to load within our organisation. Especially the ViewsCount part of it just tries to load for 10 minutes, and then gives up with an 'out of resources' error message.

Are you still working on the performance?

[Anonymous]

I have the same problem, i cannot see metrict of use in any report.

[vaibhav_osc]

@zthill Was wondering if the method of pulling O365 audit logs gives access to who/when accessed the reports as well..

I was trying to use the inbuilt usage metrics but the details doesn't seem to be enough as well as the performance is quite poor and on certain occasions the visual doesn't even load. Hence, I'm looking at alternative ways to implement this.

[zthill]

Yes it does.  You have to use PowerShell to automate pulling the logs

More info can be found here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-auditing/

[mvabalaitis]

I've noticed this issue as well on my end. The usage metrics do not appear to tie to the Audit Log details. Please advise why this would be the case. 

[samdthompson]

It would be great to see the user ID of who has viewed.

[SHHargrove]

Knowing the names of the viewers is a primary concern for us.  I see the report contains a distinct count of the users, but not their emails/names.  Can this be added please?

[Anonymous]

Unsure what the cause of this problem.  These are steps I followed:

• Have multiple datasets in an App Workspace, each with 1 report.  Each report has multiple tabs
• Get Usage Report and select File -> Save As
• Produce new Report on this data set with
  • 'Rows' as 'Reports'[DisplayName], then 'Views'[ReportPage]'
  • Columns as 'Views'[Date]
  • Value as [ViewersCount]
• Filtered data to only show metrics when [Date] is on or after 31 May 2017.

This method worked great for me this morning, I had a matrix showing all of the information i needed.  I saved this report and let some managers know.
I checked again this afternoon and the matrix errors stating it had exceeded the allowable resources.

[sirui_sun]

Hey all - thanks for the feedback.

@Anonymous: Thanks for the feedback, and apologies for the poor experience. This is an intermittent issue that we're working on fixing. For now, our guidance is to simply try again later. The fix will deploy at the same time as our planned performance improvements, as tracked by this UserVoice idea:

@zthill: are you looking over the same time span for both audit logs and usage metrics? And separately, were audit logs enabled for your organization over the entirety of that time period?

-Sirui

[zthill]

Hi @sirui_sun 

We have confirmed that we are looking at the same time period and audit logs have been enabled in the PBI tenant settings.  We've been pulling the PBI audit log data using PowerShell since prior to the usage metrics addition.  We've also queried the logs directly from https://protection.office.com/#/homepage and find the same results.  

The dashboard and report with the largest discrepency is mostly viewed from iPad.  We are trying to determine if that is possibly related.  Once the feature is added to display WHO the users were, it'll make this much easier to do a side-by-side comparision.

[sirui_sun]

Hello! Thanks for the feedback. This is in plan for the next version of usage metrics.

Please vote on the following UserVoice idea to help us further prioritize: Usage metrics show the exact e-mail address/names of users who access dashboards/reports