How to Check Power BI Dashboard Usage

Building a beautiful, insightful Power BI dashboard feels like a huge win, but your work isn't done once you hit "publish." The most important question comes next: is anyone actually using it? This article will walk you through exactly how to check your dashboard's usage statistics, understand who is looking at your reports, and what they find most interesting.

Why Bother Tracking Power BI Usage Stats?

You spent hours, maybe even days, connecting data sources, shaping data in Power Query, writing DAX measures, and arranging visuals perfectly. Tracking usage isn't about vanity, it's about validating that effort and ensuring your work is delivering real value. It’s the difference between building a tool that helps your team and a "data decoration" that sits in a digital graveyard.

Here’s why it’s so important:

• Measure ROI: Was the time spent building this report worthwhile? If key stakeholders are viewing it daily, the answer is a clear yes. If not, it might be time to ask why.
• Identify What's Working (and What Isn't): Usage reports show which specific pages or tabs in your report are most popular. If everyone is looking at the "Sales Overview" page but no one touches the "Regional Deep Dive," that tells you where users are finding the most value and where they might be getting lost or disinterested.
• Gather Feedback for Improvements: Low usage can be a signal that something is off. Maybe the data is confusing, the report loads too slowly, or it simply doesn't answer the business questions your team has. Low numbers justify reaching out to users to ask for direct feedback.
• Drive Adoption: Seeing who isn't looking at the report can be as valuable as seeing who is. If your Head of Sales hasn't opened the new sales pipeline dashboard, it's an opportunity to personally walk them through it, highlight its benefits, and help them integrate it into their routine.

Simply put, tracking usage turns you from a report builder into a strategic analyst who is actively making sure data gets into the hands of decision-makers.

Finding Your Power BI Usage Report: A Step-by-Step Guide

Power BI has a built-in feature to track usage metrics, and it's surprisingly easy to access. You don't have to build anything from scratch.

Before You Start: A Few Prerequisites

To access usage metrics, you'll need to meet a few conditions:

• You must have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. Users with free licenses can't see this feature.
• The dashboard or report must be published in a modern workspace. You can’t view usage reports for items in "My Workspace."
• You need to be an Admin, Member, or Contributor of that workspace. If you have "Viewer" permissions, you won't be able to see the usage stats.

Accessing the Report

As long as you meet the conditions above, finding the report takes less than a minute.

1. Navigate to the workspace containing the report or dashboard you want to check. You can do this from the main Power BI service home page.
2. Find your report in the list. You don't need to open it.
3. Hover over the report name and click the three dots (...) for "More options."
4. In the menu that appears, select "View usage metrics report."

That's it! Power BI will automatically generate and open a pre-built report showing all the usage data for the item you selected. This report is based on the last 90 days of activity.

Understanding the Metrics: How to Read Your Usage Report

When you open the usage report, you'll see a multi-page dashboard with various charts and numbers. At first, it might seem like a lot, but it's organized into a few simple, powerful concepts.

The "modern" usage report typically contains three main pages: Report usage, Report performance, and an FAQ page.

The "Report usage" Page

This page gives you a high-level overview of how many people are looking at your report and how often. Here are the key visuals you'll see:

Report opens by date

This is a simple bar chart showing the total number of views your report received each day. A "view" is registered every time someone opens the report. Spikes in this chart might correspond with team meetings, end-of-month reporting cycles, or big company announcements.

• Report views: The raw count of total opens. If one person opens the report 5 times, that counts as 5 views.
• Unique viewers: This card shows the number of distinct individuals who have viewed your report. One person viewing the report 5 times counts as 1 unique viewer. This metric is often more valuable for understanding your report’s actual reach.

Report opens by Display Method and Users

This helps you understand how people are accessing your report. "Display method" refers to whether they viewed it in the Power BI service (the website) or on a mobile app. The "Users" tab shows you the names and email addresses of the people who opened your report, sorted by how many times they've viewed it. This is incredibly useful for identifying your "power users."

Report page views

This is arguably the most valuable chart in the entire usage report. If your report has multiple pages or tabs, this visual breaks down the total views for each one. It directly answers the question, "What parts of my report are most useful?"

For example, if you see high traffic on your "Daily Performance Summary" page but almost none on your "50-State Breakdown" page, it's a strong signal to focus your efforts on improving and expanding those high-level summaries.

The "Report Performance" Page

How quickly your report loads directly impacts user experience. A slow report frustrates users and can lead to them abandoning it entirely. This page helps you diagnose performance issues.

Typical report opening times

This visual shows you the median open time for your report, broken down by day. It's calculated for the 25th, 50th (median), and 75th percentiles. A healthy report should ideally load in under 10 seconds. If your median open time is creeping up into the 20-30 second range, it's time to investigate.

Opening time performance Trend

This chart is similar but broken down by how users access your report. You can see how long it takes to load when it's first opened versus when opened from a web browser cache ("Low," as it's faster).

If you discover your report is slow, common culprits include:

• Using too many high-resolution visuals on a single page.
• Working with an enormous dataset in "Import" mode without proper optimization.
• Writing complex DAX measures that are not efficient.
• Slow DirectQuery sources.

Taking It to the Next Level: How to Customize Your Usage Report

The standard usage report is great for a quick look, but what if you want to dig deeper? Since the usage report is just another Power BI file, you can save a copy of it and edit it just like any other .pbix file.

This unlocks a whole new level of analysis. Here’s how you do it:

1. From the usage metrics report, click File > Save a copy.
2. Give the report a new name and save it to your desired workspace.
3. This action does two things: it saves a new, editable copy of the report, and more importantly, it saves a copy of the underlying dataset containing all the usage data.
4. You can now open your new, editable report in the Power BI service and customize the existing visuals, or even better, connect to the new dataset directly from Power BI Desktop to build a completely custom usage report from scratch.

With this method, you could, for instance, track usage over a period longer than 90 days by appending data or combining usage stats for multiple reports into one central administrative dashboard.

Things to Keep in Mind: Limitations of the Usage Report

While extremely useful, the usage metrics report isn't perfect. Be aware of a few limitations:

• Data Latency: The usage data is typically refreshed every 24 hours. The numbers you see are not live.
• Embedded Content: Usage metrics do not capture views when a report is embedded in SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, or a custom application. This is a big one to remember if you’re primarily sharing reports via these methods.
• Not a Measure of Engagement: A "view" is counted as soon as the report is opened. It doesn’t tell you if the user spent 2 seconds or 20 minutes interacting with the data.
• Permission Changes: If a user had access and then had it revoked, their past usage will still be in the report.

Final Thoughts

Creating great dashboards is about more than just data visualization, it's about closing the loop by ensuring your insights are being seen and used. Power BI's built-in usage reports are a simple yet powerful tool to understand your audience, validate your work, and make better, more valuable reports in the future.

Manually wrangling data sources is often the biggest hurdle to getting actionable insights quickly. Before you even get to building reports and dashboards in Power BI, you have to connect disparate data from your marketing and sales tools. We created Graphed to solve this by providing one-click integrations to all your platforms, from Google Analytics to Salesforce. You can ask questions in plain English, and Graphed instantly builds you a real-time dashboard, automating the entire process from data connection to final visualization, so you can go from question to insight in seconds, not hours.