What GetSnapshots Operation (in Activity Logs) means?

[karo]

Hi,

Can someone help me understand and describe what GetSnapshots really means in Activity Logs? The description in Track user activities in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn  is not helpful. What user actions relate to this operation? If we see a lot of GetSnapshots operations in Activity Logs what it means? Is it something that we should be worried about and take some actions?

Regards,

Karo

[SofBL]

according to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/admin/operation-list

this activity or operation is logged when a user retrieves snapshots that describe a semantic model such as when a user visits the data hub
so thats not meaningfull described 
Difficult to track this but to my best guess... this all has to do with caching posibilities
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-bi/connect-data/power-bi-query-caching
There is something extra if you have a premium or embedded capacity. the ability to keep something in memory cached. that does make your report loading faster, but at the price of memory consumption. Well transform that back to a pro capacity there Microsoft is in the lead of managing this. So the first time someone hits a report that data is not in memory. So the activitylog is reporting hey fellows I got the data into a snapshot. and the report is a little bit slower after that it responds faster. 
for me they are related to GetCloudSupportedDatasources 
interesting is you can have multiple getsnapshots per report view. 


 

[muxingyuang]

hi Karo, I have the same question as you.  I am the Power BI admin, I do a lot of things, I don't know which activity from me is recorded as "GetSnapShot".  But there are 2 other users are recorded to have "GetSnapShot" activity, I try to guess, maybe they have the habit of right click and download data to excel or pdf for their convenience use? 

[v-jianboli-msft]

Hi @karo ,

According to the Microsoft Learn article, the GetSnapshots operation is generated when a user retrieves snapshots that describe a dataset, such as when a user visits the data hub. A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of the data in a dataset or report. Snapshots can be used for backup, recovery, or analysis purposes.

If you see a lot of GetSnapshots operations in the activity logs, it may mean that your users are frequently accessing the data hub or creating snapshots of their datasets or reports. This may not be something to worry about, unless you have concerns about the storage space or performance of your Power BI service.

However, if you want to create scheduled snapshots of your Power BI data and report, you may want to... that can automate this process for you. You can choose to create copies of your report or dataset in another workspace, or export part of your data as CSV files and send them to your email address. You can also customize the frequency and format of your snapshots.

Best Regards,

Jianbo Li

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[karo]

@v-jianboli-msft

Can you please explain it to me a little bit more, please? What GetSnapshot in Power BI Service really means? And I know what term “snapshot” means in general, I really would like to understand what it means in Power BI Activity Logs.

(preferably please try explain like to "grandma").

 If those are the operations of accessing datasets via datahub then why those operations are not connected with datasets in Activity Logs?