How to View Usage Metrics in Power BI Workspace

Knowing who uses your Power BI reports and why is just as important as building them in the first place. Without that feedback loop, your dashboards are just shots in the dark. Thankfully, Power BI has a built-in feature to solve this. This article will walk you through how to access and interpret the Usage Metrics report, understand what each metric means, and even customize it to fit your specific needs.

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What Are Power BI Usage Metrics (And Why Should You Care)?

Power BI Usage Metrics provide a pre-built report that shows you exactly how people in your organization are interacting with your published content - dashboards, reports, and datasets. Think of it as analytics for your analytics. Instead of guessing which reports are valuable, you get real data to back up your decisions.

So, why is this important? Monitoring your usage metrics helps you:

• Measure Adoption: Are people actually using the reports you spend hours building? A report with zero views is a clear sign that it’s either not needed or nobody knows it exists.
• Identify Popular Content: Discover which reports and dashboards your colleagues find most useful. This can help you focus your efforts on maintaining and improving high-value content.
• Find Unused or Redundant Content: Clean up your workspace by identifying reports that are gathering digital dust. Retiring unused content keeps things organized and reduces confusion.
• Understand User Behavior: Learn how people access your BI content. Are they predominantly on desktop or using the mobile app? Who are your power users? These insights help you design better, more user-friendly reports.
• Justify BI Efforts: High engagement numbers are powerful evidence to show stakeholders that your business intelligence initiatives are delivering real value to the organization.

Modern Power BI workspaces use an updated "modern" usage report, which offers more detailed insights, including report performance. That’s what we’ll focus on here, as it’s now the standard experience.

How to Access the Power BI Usage Report: A Step-by-Step Guide

Finding the usage report is straightforward. You just need to have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license and be an admin, member, or contributor in the workspace where the content is published. Viewers can't access usage metrics.

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Step 1: Navigate to Your Workspace and Find a Report

First, log in to the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com) and navigate to the workspace containing the report or dashboard you want to analyze. From your workspace, hover over the report you're interested in.

Step 2: Click on "More options"

When you hover over a report, you'll see a few icons appear. Click the three dots (…) to open the "More options" menu.

Step 3: Select "View usage metrics report"

From the dropdown menu, simply click on "View usage metrics report." Power BI will then open a pre-generated dashboard with several pages of data about your reports, dashboards, and datasets in that workspace.

The first time you launch it, Power BI might take a moment to generate the report and its underlying dataset. Once it loads, you'll be dropped into a detailed, multi-page report ready for your analysis.

Deconstructing the Modern Usage Report

The modern usage report has two primary pages that give you deep insights into content engagement and performance. Let's break down what you’ll find on each page.

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The "Report usage" Page

This is the main dashboard, giving you a high-level overview of which reports are being viewed and by whom. It answers the question, "What is my most popular content?"

Here are the key visuals and what they mean:

• Total Views: This is a simple count of all "Report Open" events. If someone opens a report, closes it, and opens it again, that counts as two views.
• Total Viewers: This card shows the number of distinct users who have viewed any report in the workspace. If one person views a report 10 times, they still only count as one viewer.
• Views in the last 30 days: This line chart trends the number of report views over the past 30 days, helping you spot spikes in activity or dips in engagement. For example, you might see a spike after sending out an email notification about an updated report.
• A Table of Reports: This is the most detailed part of the page. It lists every report in the workspace and provides key metrics for each:

You can also filter the entire report page by date using the slicer at the top right, allowing you to focus on usage patterns over specific time periods like the last week or quarter.

Note: If you see "Unnamed" in the user list, it means your Power BI admin has disabled collecting personal user information in the tenant settings for privacy reasons.

The "Report performance" Page

A slow-loading report is a report nobody wants to use. The "Report performance" page is designed to help you diagnose and fix performance bottlenecks before they become a problem for your users. It answers the question, "Are my reports fast enough?"

This page analyzes how long it takes for your reports to load and render for users. Here are the main components:

• Typical report opening time (sec): This shows you the median opening time for reports, giving you a general sense of performance. It breaks it down by how a report is opened - for a new user, a new report, or based on the consumption method (Power BI Service vs. Mobile).
• Opening Time Trend: This line chart tracks the opening time trend over the last 30 days. This is incredibly useful for spotting issues. If you notice a sudden spike in load times, it could correlate with a recent change you made, like adding a complex DAX measure or a large dataset.
• Performance Breakdown by Consumption Method: This visual compares the median opening times between an opening via a modern browser (the Power BI Service) and the mobile app. It's not uncommon to see slightly longer load times on mobile.

Use this page proactively. If a report you identified as 'popular' on the usage page has a very high load time here, it's a prime candidate for performance optimization.

How to Customize the Usage Metrics Report

While the pre-built report is fantastic, its true power is unlocked when you customize it. Microsoft allows you to save a copy of the usage report and its underlying dataset, which you can then edit just like any other Power BI report.

This opens up endless possibilities for deeper analysis. For example, maybe you want to see which departments use your reports the most, but that data isn't in Power BI. With a custom report, you could connect to an HR data source and merge the information.

Here’s how to do it:

1. In the Usage Metrics report, go to File > Save a copy.
2. Give your new report a name and save it. This creates a new .PBIX file in your workspace.
3. You can now open this file in Power BI Desktop to make any changes you'd like.

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Ideas for Customization:

• User-Level Dashboards: Create a new page that focuses solely on your top 10 most active users across all reports.
• Department-Level Analysis: Connect to an external data source, like an employee directory from Azure Active Directory or a simple Excel sheet, to map users to their respective departments. This lets you build visuals that show, for example, that the Sales department accounts for 60% of all report views.
• Rebrand It: Update the report with your company’s color theme, fonts, and a logo to make it feel like an official internal report.
• Add Custom Measures: Write your own DAX measures. For instance, you could create a "Views per User" measure to identify the average engagement level.

By customizing the report, you transform a standard diagnostic tool into a tailored BI dashboard that speaks to your organization's specific questions and goals.

Key Limitations & Things to Remember

The usage metrics feature is powerful, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Data Latency: The usage data is not real-time. It can take up to 24 hours for events to appear in the report.
• Permission is Key: You need edit rights to the source report and workspace to see usage metrics. Users with a viewer role cannot.
• Pro License Required: Accessing and creating usage reports requires a Power BI Pro or PPU license.
• Drill-Through Actions Aren't Views: A view is counted when a report is initially opened. Navigating between pages or using drill-through features within a single report session doesn't count as additional views.

Final Thoughts

Monitoring your Power BI usage statistics is a vital step in building a data-driven culture. This built-in reporting feature offers an easy way to get direct feedback on which reports are proving valuable, ensure they perform well, and identify opportunities for training or cleanup so your BI efforts can have the greatest impact.

While Power BI is excellent for understanding its own ecosystem, most teams are pulling data from a dozen other platforms - from Google Analytics and Shopify to your CRM and ad platforms. That's where we wanted to create a simpler approach. With Graphed, we let you connect all your data sources in a few clicks, then ask questions in plain English to build real-time, cross-platform dashboards. This helps turn hours of manual CSV exporting and spreadsheet wrangling into instant answers, freeing you up to act on insights instead of just hunting for them.