How to Check Power BI Report Usage

Building a powerful report is only half the battle, knowing if anyone actually uses it is the other. Understanding how people interact with your Power BI reports lets you identify what's valuable, what's not, and where you can make improvements. This article walks you through the different ways to check Power BI report usage, from simple built-in tools to more advanced techniques.

Why Track Power BI Report Usage in the First Place?

Tracking usage metrics isn't about vanity - it’s about effectiveness. You spent hours connecting data sources, building a data model, and designing visuals. Knowing if that effort paid off is essential. Here’s why it’s so important:

• Pinpoint Valuable Reports: Discover which reports your team relies on daily versus which ones are gathering digital dust. This helps you prioritize maintenance and updates on reports that matter most.
• Optimize Report Performance: If a popular report is running slowly, you know that performance optimizations will have a significant impact on many users. Conversely, spending hours optimizing a report nobody uses isn't the best use of time.
• Drive User Adoption: Low usage numbers can be an early warning sign. Are people unaware the report exists? Do they need training on how to use it? Or does it simply not answer the right questions? Usage data helps you start asking the right questions to improve adoption.
• Refine Content Strategy: By analyzing which pages and visuals within a report get the most attention, you can learn what information your audience finds most helpful and replicate those wins in future reports.
• Justify BI Investments: Demonstrating that reports are actively being used to drive decisions provides a clear return on investment (ROI) for your company's spending on Power BI licenses and development resources.

Method 1: The Built-In Usage Metrics Report

The simplest and most direct way to see how a specific report is doing is by using the usage metrics report built directly into the Power BI service. It's available for individual reports and provides a quick, high-level summary of engagement.

How to Access the Report

Getting to the usage report is straightforward. Just follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the workspace containing the report you want to analyze.
2. Find the report in the list.
3. Hover over the report and click the three dots for More options (...).
4. From the dropdown menu, select Open usage metrics.

Power BI will automatically generate a usage report that looks and feels just like a regular Power BI report. This report is pre-configured with several useful charts and metrics based on up to 90 days of historical data.

What's Inside the Modern Usage Report?

The latest version of the usage metrics report gives you key insights across three main pages:

• Report usage: This main page offers an overview of engagement trends, including:
• Report performance: This page helps you diagnose slow-loading reports. You can see typical report opening times and track whether performance is degrading over time.
• FAQ: A helpful page with definitions and explanations of the metrics used in the report.

Customizing the Usage Report

The default report is handy, but its real power comes from customization. In the top-right corner of the generated usage report, you'll see a button that says "Save a copy". Clicking this will create a brand new .pbix file that includes the underlying dataset of your usage data. You can then download this file, open it in Power BI Desktop, and modify it just like any other report.

This allows you to:

• Add a company logo and custom branding.
• Change chart types to ones you prefer.
• Combine usage data with other internal data sources.
• Add custom filters, slicers, and measures specific to your needs.

Limitations of the Built-in Report

While this method is excellent for quick checks, it has a few limitations:

• Data Retention: It only stores the past 30-90 days of data, and the underlying data model can change, causing old reports to fail or expire. If you need to track usage trends over a longer period, you'll need a different solution.
• Lack of Depth: It tells you who viewed a report but not which filters they used or how long they stayed on a particular page.
• Admin Required: You generally need to be a workspace admin or the report author to view usage metrics.

Method 2: Using the Power Platform Admin Center

If you're a Power BI administrator for your organization, you have access to a more powerful, tenant-wide view of usage analytics through the Power Platform Admin Center. This is where you can go to see aggregate trends across all workspaces, not just a single report.

How to Access the Admin Analytics

If you have the appropriate permissions (Global Admin, Power Platform Admin, or Power BI Service Admin), you can access these reports:

1. Log in to the Power Platform Admin Center.
2. On the left navigation pane, select Analytics, then choose Power BI.

Here you will find a dashboard that shows user activity across your entire Power BI tenant. You can filter data by date ranges and see trends for metrics such as:

• Most consumed dashboards and reports across the organization.
• Most active workspaces and users.
• Breakdowns of report creation, viewing, and sharing activities.

This method is fantastic for governance and getting a bird's-eye view of your organization's BI culture. It helps you identify which departments are embracing data and where you might need to focus more training and resources.

Method 3: Advanced Analysis with the Power BI REST API

For the most granular, flexible, and long-term solution, you can use the Power BI REST API to programmatically extract detailed audit logs. This is the most technical method, but it gives you complete control over your usage data.

The key API here is the Get Activity Events endpoint, often called the "audit log API." It returns detailed information about every single action taken within your Power BI tenant - every report view, publish, share, dataset refresh, etc.

High-Level Steps to Use the API

Setting this up involves several steps and requires technical skills:

1. Admin Consent: A Power BI tenant administrator must first enable audit logging in the Power BI admin portal.
2. Azure App Registration: You need to register an application in Azure Active Directory and grant it permissions to read the Power BI tenant activity data (e.g., Tenant.Read.All).
3. Call the API: Using a script (like PowerShell, Python) or a tool like Postman, you can authenticate and call the GetActivityEvents endpoint. You'll specify a start and end time to pull activity data in chunks (you can only pull up to 24 hours of data per request).
4. Store the Data: The API returns data in JSON format. You need to store these responses somewhere durable, such as an Azure SQL Database, Azure Data Lake, or even just folders of CSV files in Blob Storage. You would run your script on a schedule (e.g., daily) to continually pull the latest activity data.
5. Build Your Own Report: Once you have a historical archive of your activity data, you can connect Power BI to that data source and build a completely bespoke usage analytics report.

Benefits of the API Method:

• Unlimited Data Retention: Since you are storing the data yourself, you can keep usage data for years, allowing for long-term trend analysis.
• Complete Customization: You are in full control of the data model and can create any KPI or visualization you need.
• Combine Data Sources: You can merge the usage data with other information, like HR data to analyze report usage by department, or IT data to correlate usage with system performance.

This approach transforms usage tracking from a simple report into a robust BI solution of its own.

Putting It All Together: How to Act on Usage Data

Collecting data is just the first step. The real value comes from interpreting it and taking action.

• A report with high views and many unique users is a success. Celebrate it, ensure it's well-maintained, and use it as an example of what resonates with your audience.
• A report with high views but very few unique users points to a critical tool for a small team. Connect with those power users - they can provide invaluable feedback for improvements.
• A report with an initial spike in views followed by a sharp drop-off signals an adoption problem. Users checked it out but didn't come back. Investigate why. Is the data confusing? Does it load too slowly? Is it missing key information?
• A report with near-zero views is a "ghost ship." It's an opportunity to declutter. Find out if it’s truly not needed or if potential users just don’t know it exists. If it's obsolete, retire it.

Final Thoughts

Tracking how your reports are used is essential for building an effective BI culture. Whether you use the simple built-in usage metrics, the broader Admin Center dashboards, or a custom solution built on the REST API, the insights you gain will help you focus your efforts, improve user adoption, and deliver more value to your organization.

Part of building a data-driven team is making analytics accessible to everyone, not just those who are comfortable inside complex BI tools. At Graphed, we focus on simplifying this process for marketing and sales teams. Instead of waiting on data analysts or painstakingly building reports yourself, you connect your apps and then just ask questions in plain English. We turn hours of complex analysis across platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce into 30-second conversations, making it easy for everyone on your team to get the answers they need to make smarter decisions, faster.