How to Get Power BI Usage Report

Ever wonder if the beautiful Power BI reports you built are actually being used, or if they’re just collecting digital dust? Tracking usage isn't about vanity, it's about understanding what resonates with your audience, optimizing performance, and making sure your team's efforts are paying off. This guide will walk you through several methods to get a Power BI usage report, from simple built-in options to creating a fully customized monitoring dashboard.

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Why Bother Tracking Power BI Usage?

Before diving into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Monitoring your Power BI environment isn't just an admin task - it's a strategic move that helps you make sense of your data culture. When you analyze usage, you can:

• Identify valuable assets: Discover which reports and dashboards are most popular. This tells you what information your team finds valuable and helps you prioritize future development and support.
• Clean up clutter: Find reports, dashboards, and datasets that are no longer being used. Deleting or archiving this unused content declutters workspaces and makes it easier for users to find what they need.
• Optimize performance: Pinpoint reports that are slow to load or datasets that are being refreshed unnecessarily. Usage data can shine a light on performance bottlenecks you might otherwise miss.
• Measure ROI: You invest significant time and resources into building BI solutions. Usage metrics help you demonstrate the value and adoption of these tools across the organization.
• Ensure Governance and Compliance: For admins, understanding who is accessing what data and how often is critical for security and governance. A usage report can highlight unusual activity or confirm that sensitive data is being handled properly.

Essentially, a good usage report turns you from a report builder into a strategic information manager, helping your organization become more data-driven and efficient.

Method 1: Using the Built-in Report Usage Metrics

The simplest way to get a quick pulse on a specific report or dashboard is by using the built-in usage metrics report. This is available to content creators and owners directly within the Power BI service.

How to Access the Built-in Report

It only takes a few clicks to see these basic insights:

1. Navigate to the workspace containing the report or dashboard you want to check.
2. Hover over the report or dashboard and click the three dots for More options (...).
3. From the dropdown menu, select Open usage metrics.

Power BI will instantly generate a new report based on usage data for the last 90 days. It’s a pre-built dashboard containing key metrics like:

• Report views & Viewers: See how many times the report has been viewed and by how many unique users.
• Rank: Compare the popularity of this report to others in your organization.
• Views per day: A line chart showing daily views, which helps you spot trends or spikes in activity.
• Unique viewers per day: A similar line chart showing unique users each day.
• Platform or Method: See if users are accessing the content through the Power BI service ("Cloud"), a mobile device ("Mobile"), or an embedded location ("Embedded").

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Limitations of the Built-in Report

While this method is quick and easy, it has some significant limitations:

• It's isolated: It only shows data for one report or dashboard at a time. You can't see a summary of your entire workspace or tenant.
• Limited history: The report only ever shows data from the last 90 days.
• Not customizable: You're stuck with the visuals and data points Power BI provides. You can't add custom calculations, different chart types, or bring in other data sources.

This report is perfect for a quick, high-level glance at a single asset's performance. But for deeper analysis or tenant-wide monitoring, you’ll need to use more advanced methods.

Method 2: Using the Power BI Admin Portal (For Admins)

If you're a Power BI administrator, you have access to tenant-level usage metrics through the Power BI Admin Portal. This gives you a much broader view of what's happening across your entire organization.

What You Can Find in the Admin Portal

The admin portal centralizes key statistics to help you manage your Power BI environment. Here, you can find aggregate usage data for your entire tenant, not just one report.

The usage metrics dashboard includes visuals for:

• Most consumed dashboards and reports.
• Most active users in the organization.
• Usage trends for workspaces, reports, dashboards, and datasets.
• A detailed list of user activities.

How to Access the Admin Usage Dashboard

1. In the Power BI service, click the Settings gear icon in the top-right corner.
2. Select Admin portal from the dropdown. (You will only see this option if you have an admin role).
3. In the navigation pane on the left, click on Usage metrics.

This pre-built dashboard is a solid starting point for admins needing a high-level overview. However, like the first method, it is not deeply customizable and may not answer all of your specific governance or optimization questions. For true flexibility, you'll want to build your own report from the raw activity logs.

Method 3: Creating a Custom Usage Report from an App (from the Microsoft Store/App Launcher)

For one of the most comprehensive views of your organization's entire Power BI library of activity, Microsoft created its own app/dashboard that you can download.

1. Sign into the Power BI App Store: https://app.powerbi.com/
2. Select workspaces, then My Workspace. Then you may add the app through the 'Get Data' page. Find the search field called 'Search apps from App Source' and begin to type in activity.
3. Once there, click on 'Show apps from App Source' button and type into their own dialogue 'Power BI Activity Log.' And select the app. It's titled 'Power BI Admin Reporting - Enabled by Project Stockholm' and then 'Get it now.'
4. After selecting 'Install', it'll appear in your list of apps under your personal Workspace. When you launch it for the first time, you may receive a notification at its top indicating the app and the visualizations it contains are dummy placeholders so nothing looks blank. But, this will give you an idea as to what to expect in real time. Just in case you see a long list of numbers and names you don't recognize... no worries. It's intended.
5. When prompted, on-screen just enter the amount of prior data you want it to grab. The field says it can max up to 60, but technically... if you keep track, you can put 30, and revisit this dashboard on day 29, updating the connection so on.

Although an entire setup comes right to you for use upon download to your workspace, as far as customization of the dashboard and editing privileges, however, there will be times that you can't modify the dashboard's template from how Microsoft sent it. Instead, you'll need to download the source's data:

1. Once again, enter your list of Workspaces until you find the source to the "Stockholm Admin" report that your Power BI Desktop recognizes. Once there, you will also receive all data source/dataset used for all visualizations and charts, plus permission to edit/modify it as needed (as opposed to just working within its set template). From there, you pretty much have all the freedom you want to customize and shape how this will look with real activity/user/data info.

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Method 4: Creating a Custom Usage Report from the Activity Log (Advanced User)

Welcome to the biggest. This option offers maximum control in building an incredibly robust, automated user report. Instead of accessing the app, this route lets you make every change custom fit, every dataset your own, and every chart meant to communicate your goals through a well-crafted dashboard. You essentially follow a similar process to connecting with the REST API and accessing its endpoint via Power BI Desktop.

Step 1: Get Access/Find the REST API and the Required Credentials

The only way to reach much of Power BI's information, Activity Logs, and other internal documents is through the REST API endpoint. For authentication, a majority of platforms will use an OAuth2 authentication method. This is where you would get these codes to access the platform's data as it's been recorded and logged on the backend.

Step 2: Prepare Power Query

Before importing this data to analyze patterns in user/data info, it will first be delivered in the form of a 'JSON document' which is easier for a computer to process than for us to read. Since Power BI accepts data input by way of either CSV or tables, we must first find a way to translate the raw JSON from each call into an appropriate table format to be used in Power BI. Those looking for a slightly simpler method should explore their options, they all operate the same way: JSON formatted logs are converted into a more legible CSV version for Power BI.

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Step 3: Fetch Your Data

Due to the varying structure of Activity Logs and the size of stored data, pagination becomes essential. Continue making API calls in sequence to avoid triggering the timeout limit, which can be an issue if overlooked. One effective solution is using List Generate in Power Query. It supports paginated data import efficiently.

Building Your Custom Usage Report in Power BI Desktop

Once you have a table of activity logs in the Power Query Editor, start transforming it into a useful dataset.

How do Activity Logs, JSON, Web.Contents, and More Tie Back Together?

1. Clean and Transform: In this case, with how we accessed the data, no cleaning would be necessary until we reach the JSON to CSV conversion steps. Even that isn't too complicated once you're familiar with Power Query and writing M code.
2. Model Your Data: Get your table into a state where it's ready to load into Power BI, creating more interesting visualizations around your workspace.
3. Build Your Dashboard: Drag and drop measures and dimensions onto the report canvas to create visualizations that answer your team's questions.

Best Practices for Monitoring Power BI Usage

Getting the data is just the first step. To get the most out of your usage reports, follow these best practices:

• Schedule Regular Reviews: Make checking your usage dashboard a monthly or quarterly habit. Look for long-term trends, not just daily spikes.
• Take Action on Insights: Don't let the data just sit there. If a report is unused, reach out to the owner to see if it's still needed. If a report is extremely popular, consider if there are ways to improve or expand on it.
• Combine Usage Data with Feedback: Quantitative data (views, shares) tells you what is happening, but qualitative feedback (user comments, surveys) tells you why. Combine both to get the full picture.
• Promote a Data Cleanup Culture: Encourage content creators to review their own usage metrics and archive old content. A clean workspace benefits everyone.

Final Thoughts

Understanding how your team interacts with Power BI is essential for optimizing your analytics efforts. Whether you're using the simple built-in metrics for a single report or building a comprehensive and customized usage report from the activity log, tracking usage helps you prove value, reduce clutter, and make smarter decisions.

Building specialized internal dashboards in tools like Power BI is a powerful way to monitor performance within that specific ecosystem. However, most teams don't operate in a single tool. We know the pain of connecting dots between Power BI for internal data, Google Analytics for website traffic, Salesforce for sales activity, and a handful of ad platforms for marketing performance. That's why we built Graphed, to centralize all your marketing and sales data sources in one place, allowing you to build real-time, cross-platform dashboards just by describing what you need in plain English - no manual exports or pivot tables required.