How to Create a Usage Report in Power BI

Building a dashboard in Power BI is just the beginning. The real question is: are people actually using it? A usage report answers this by showing you who is viewing your dashboards, which pages are most popular, and how engagement changes over time. This article will walk you through how to create and analyze usage reports in Power BI, using both the quick built-in methods and the more powerful custom options.

What is a Power BI Usage Report?

A Power BI usage report, also known as usage metrics, offers a direct look into how end-users interact with your dashboards and reports. Think of it as a form of internal analytics for your analytics. It helps you move beyond just publishing reports to understanding their impact and value within your organization.

Tracking these metrics is essential for a few key reasons:

• Measure ROI: You invest time and resources into building reports. Usage metrics help prove that investment is paying off by demonstrating adoption and engagement.
• Optimize Content: By identifying the most viewed (and least viewed) pages and reports, you can focus your efforts on what users find valuable and either improve or retire content that no longer serves a purpose.
• Improve User Experience: Are users struggling with a specific report? A sudden drop-off in views might indicate a performance issue or confusing visualization. This data gives you a starting point for talking to your users.
• Clean Up Your Workspace: Over time, Power BI workspaces can get cluttered with old, unused reports. Usage data helps you confidently identify and archive content that nobody is looking at.

Two Ways to Monitor Usage in Power BI

Power BI provides two main pathways for accessing usage data. The best method depends on how much detail and customization you need.

1. The Built-in Usage Report: This is a pre-built, one-click report that Power BI generates for any specific dashboard or report in a workspace. It's incredibly fast and perfect for quick checks on individual assets.
2. The Custom Usage Report: By saving a copy of the built-in report, you gain access to its underlying dataset. This allows you to open it in Power BI Desktop and build a fully customized report that analyzes usage across your entire workspace, not just a single item.

We'll walk through both methods, starting with the quick and easy one.

Method 1: Using the Built-in Power BI Usage Report

This is the simplest way to get a snapshot of a single report's performance. It’s ideal for when a stakeholder asks, "Is anyone looking at that monthly sales report we launched?" and you need an answer fast.

How to Access the Built-in Report

You can generate this report in just a few clicks from the Power BI service (the browser version of Power BI).

1. Navigate to the workspace containing the report or dashboard you want to analyze.
2. In the content list, find your report and hover over it. Click the three dots (…,) for "More options."
3. From the dropdown menu, select "View usage metrics report."

That's it. Power BI will instantly generate a pre-built report showing usage trends over the last 30 days.

What’s Inside the Default Report?

The built-in report gives you several useful visuals and key performance indicators (KPIs) right out of the box:

• Report views: A total count of how many times any page in the report has been viewed.
• Viewers: The total number of unique users who have viewed the report.
• Views per day: A line chart showing daily views, which is great for spotting trends or spikes in traffic.
• Unique viewers per day: Similar to the above, but tracks unique users to give you a better sense of daily audience size.
• Report pages table: A simple table that breaks down views by each specific page within your report, so you can see which tabs get the most attention.
• Users table: A list of who has viewed the report and how many times.

Heads-up: The data in this report is limited to the last 30 days and you have very limited options for filtering or customization beyond basic slicing. For deeper analysis, you’ll want to create a custom report.

Method 2: Building a Custom Usage Report

The built-in report is a great start, but what if you want to analyze usage for all reports in a workspace? Or view trends over the last 90 days? Or blend the usage data with information from another source, like an employee directory? To do that, you need to connect to the raw usage data itself. Fortunately, Power BI makes this simple.

Every time you open a built-in usage report, Power BI creates a dataset behind the scenes. Your goal is to get a copy of that dataset so you can work with it in Power BI Desktop.

Step 1: Save a Copy of the Usage Report

First, open the built-in usage report for any report in your desired workspace using the steps from Method 1.

Once the usage metrics report is open, go to the top menu bar:

1. Click File > Save a copy.
2. Give your new report a name, like "Workspace Usage - Master Report."
3. Save it in the same workspace.

This action doesn't just copy the visuals, it creates an entirely new Power BI report file (.pbix) that is tied to a dataset containing usage information for the entire workspace spanning the last 90 days.

Step 2: Connect and Explore in Power BI Desktop

Now, open the Power BI Desktop application on your computer. You’ll connect to the dataset you just created.

1. On the Home tab, select Get Data and choose Power BI datasets.
2. Find the dataset corresponding to the report you saved — in our example, "Workspace Usage - Master Report." Click Connect.
3. You now have a live connection to the usage data. You can see the tables and fields available in the "Data" pane on the right-hand side.

You’ll discover a data model with helpful tables and columns, such as:

• A Dates table for time-based analysis.
• A Reports table containing the names and unique IDs of all reports in the workspace.
• A Users table with the names and email addresses (User Principal Names) of the people who viewed the reports.
• A Report Usage fact table that includes EventDate, ReportGuid, and UserPrincipalName, which ties everything together.

Step 3: Build Custom Visuals and Measures

With full access to the data model, you can now build a truly tailored usage dashboard.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Create a "Top 10 Most Viewed Reports" Chart

The default report only shows you page views within a single report. Now you can compare all reports against each other.

• Drag a bar chart visual onto the canvas.
• Drag the DisplayName field from the Reports table to the Y-axis.
• Drag the Views measure to the X-axis.
• In the "Filters" pane, add a Top N filter to DisplayName to show the Top 10 by the value of Views.

This instantly shows you which reports are the true workhorses of your workspace.

Identify Your Power Users

You can create a similar chart to find the most active users across the entire workspace.

• Create another bar chart.
• Drag the DisplayName field from the Users table to the Y-axis.
• Drag the Views measure to the X-axis.
• Add a Top N filter to find your top 10 or top 20 users.

Write Custom DAX Measures

With Power BI Desktop, you can write Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) to create new metrics. For example, let's calculate the average number of views per viewer.

Click "New measure" and enter this formula:

Views per Viewer = DIVIDE( [Views], [Viewers] )

You can add this new measure to a card visual or a table to quickly see how engaged the average user is. A high number suggests that people return to your reports frequently, which is a great sign of value.

Track Inactive Content

Just as important as finding popular content is finding outdated content. You can create a table of reports that haven't been viewed in over 30 or 60 days. This helps you identify reports that are safe to archive, keeping your workspace clean and easy to navigate for everyone.

Final Thoughts

Monitoring your Power BI report usage is a critical step in building a data-driven culture. Whether you use the quick built-in report for a fast engagement check or create a custom master report for deep-dive analysis, this data provides the feedback you need to create better, more impactful analytics for your organization.

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