Power BI – How to view Usage metrics in Power BI workspace

[Anonymous]

What is usage metrics?

Usage metrics is one of the feature in Power BI Service. The usage metrics report will give you an analysis of how many times the content is viewed or share, through which platforms (web or mobile), and by which users.

We can have two different set of usage metrics

1. Dashboard usage metrics

2. Report usage metrics

1.Dashboard Usage metrics

In order to see Dashboard usage metrics, you can go to Workspaces and select any workspace then go to Dashboards tab and then click on Usage metrics icon from Actions. Once prompted, you can select view usage metrics button.

Or, you can go to workspace and from Dashboard section, click on dashboard to open it then click on Usage metrics

Note: You will not able to see usage metrics for shared reports

Once you clicked on Usage metrics button, you can see a report with visuals describing consumption of dashboard with users. 

Note- Dashboards can’t be modified and tiles of the dashboard are not linked with any underlying report. But you can personalized this dashboard(Save as) as a report and can do further analyses to the report and also you can add/remove the visualization to it.

A report will be saved in Reports group. Additionally, a dataset will be created named Dashboard Usage Metric-Model.

The dataset will be not visible in Power BI service under workspaces->Datasets. You can see this in Power BI desktop while connecting with Power BI dataset.

2.Report Usage metrics

In order to see Report usage metrics, you can go to Workspaces and select any workspace then go to Reports tab and then click on Usage metrics icon from Actions. Once prompted, you can select view usage metrics button.

Once you clicked on usage metrics button, you can see a report with visuals describing consumption of reports with users.

Note- Report can’t be modified .But you can personalized this report(Save as) as a report and can do further analyses to the report and also you can add/remove the visualization to it. You can see your file under Reports in Workspace.

A report will be saved in Reports group. Additionally, a dataset will be created named Report Usage Metric Model.

The dataset will be not visible in Power BI service under workspaces->Datasets. You can see this in Power BI desktop while connecting with Power BI dataset.

Few important points:

1. You can only view the report usage metrics, if you want to customize this report, you have an option to do Save as. For this click on File menu and select Save as from dropdown. Once you saved the file it will show under Reports. Additionally, a dataset will be created named Report Usage Metric Model.

2.Once, you saved your file, then you can add/remove the visuals, to add/remove the visual, you click on Edit report option  in Power BI service.

3.You can’t download your customized PBI report. If you want to consume this PBI report dataset, you can use Power BI dataset (Live connection) connector from Get Data option present in Power BI desktop and you will be able to create visualization in Power BI Desktop. 

4. A Power BI pro license and edit rights to the app workspace are required to access usage metrics. Usage data is retained for 90 days, Changes to Usage metrics dashboard/report may take 24 hours to appear in usage metrics under views by user table visual.

5.You will not be able to see the usage metrics across all the workspaces as of now, it is only available for one workspace. You will be only able to see the Reports and Dashboard usage metrics for single workspace.

6. Usage metrics track usage of reports that are embedded in SharePoint Online. However, usage metrics don't track embedding of dashboards and reports via the “user owns credentials” or “app owns credentials” flow. Usage metrics also don't track usage of reports embedding via publish to web.

7.If you are the admin of the Workspace and also the added members have the edit access to that workspace, then all the members and Admin can see usage metrics for Power BI reports and dashboards. If the members have view access, then the member can’t see the usage metrics for Power BI reports and dashboards.

Note: In Power BI workspace, members can either have a view access or edit.

8. In order to see overall consumption of report instead of viewing for every report in a workspace ,remove the ReportGuid from Report level filter. For example ,you have customized Report usage metrics report by using save as. Click on Edit report in Power BI service and remove the ReportGuid from Report level filter.

9. Once , we remove the filter of Reportguid from Report level filter, report usage metrics will show the usage metrics for all the reports in the workspace.

Note:- Similarly, we can see the Usage metrics for all the dashboards in a workspace. In that case, remove the Dashboardguid from the Report level filter from customized dashboard usage metrics report.

10. If you are Power BI administrator, then you will be available to access Admin portal in Power BI. In Admin portal, Admin will be able to see usage metrics for all Power BI content across the organization.

Note: The usage metrics present in Admin portal is different from Usage metrics for reports and dashboards. Usage metrics present in Admin portal can give overall monitoring view of which users views most of the content and which reports and dashboards have been used most. This Usage metrics will also give information related to total no. of dashboards and reports we have in our organization. Apart from this you will also able to see more information related to workspaces and other info.

11. There is a setting under Admin portal for tenant (Admin portal->Tenant settings) using that Power BI admin can disable the usage metrics feature for content creators. Content creators are people who create Power BI reports, dashboards, and datasets. By default, content creators have access to the usage metrics report.

12.There is one more setting under Tenant settings that admin can enable or disable. This setting “Per-user data in usage metrics for content creators”. Per-user data is useful especially if you want to monitor usage by user to see are they using the content shared with them or not.

If admin disable this then instead of showing name and email address of the user it will show “Unnamed”