How to Create Usage Metrics Report in Power BI

Ever spend weeks perfecting a gorgeous Power BI report, only to wonder if anyone is actually looking at it? You're not alone. Figuring out who uses your reports, which pages they find most helpful, and whether your masterpiece is gathering dust is essential for making your work truly count. This guide will walk you through creating a usage metrics report in Power BI, first using the simple built-in tool and then by building a more powerful, custom dashboard from scratch.

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Why Bother Tracking Power BI Usage?

Before we jump into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Tracking usage isn't about feeding your ego or spying on coworkers, it’s about making smarter decisions and improving your reports. When you know how people interact with your dashboards, you can:

• Justify your effort: Show stakeholders that the reports you build are providing real value and being used to make decisions.
• Boost adoption: Identify teams or individuals who aren't using the report and find out why. Maybe they need a quick training session or weren’t aware the report existed.
• Focus your improvements: Discover the most popular pages and visuals. This tells you where to invest your time making enhancements and what kind of information your audience finds most valuable.
• Retire unused reports: If a report gets zero views month after month, it’s probably safe to sunset it. This cleans up your workspace and reduces clutter.
• Optimize performance: The usage report includes performance data, helping you spot which pages are loading slowly and frustrating your users.

In short, usage metrics turn your report-building from guesswork into a data-driven process of continuous improvement.

Option 1: The Quick and Easy Built-in Usage Report

Power BI comes with a ready-made usage report that you can access with just a couple of clicks. It’s the perfect starting point and often provides enough information for a basic health check on your report.

Here’s how to find and use it:

1. Navigate to the workspace containing the report or dashboard you want to analyze.
2. Find your report in the list. To the right of the report name, click the three dots for "More options" (…).
3. From the dropdown menu, select View usage metrics report.

The first time you do this, Power BI will take a moment to generate the report and its underlying dataset. Once it loads, you’ll see a pre-built dashboard with several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and visuals, typically including:

• Report views: The total number of times any page in the report was opened.
• Unique viewers: The count of distinct users who have opened the report. One person viewing the report 10 times still counts as one unique viewer.
• Views per day: A bar chart showing a daily trend of viewership.
• Report performance: A breakdown of typical report page load times, which is super helpful for spotting slow pages.
• Views by user: A list of who has viewed the report the most.

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Limitations of the Built-in Report

This default report is great for a quick look. However, it has a few drawbacks:

• Limited Customization: While you can "Save a copy" to get an editable version, the underlying data model is rigid. You can't easily add new data or create complex measures.
• Report-Specific: Each usage report is tied to a single source report. You can't see usage metrics for your entire workspace in one consolidated view.
• 90-Day Window: It only shows data for the last 90 days.

If you need more flexibility or want to analyze usage across multiple reports, it's time to build your own.

Option 2: Creating a Custom Usage Metrics Dashboard

For complete control, you can connect directly to the usage data that Power BI creates and build a report totally customized to your needs. This sounds complicated, but it's pretty straightforward. When you generate that first built-in usage report, Power BI automatically creates a dataset called "Report Usage Metrics Model" for you. We’re going to connect to that dataset in Power BI Desktop.

Step 1: Open Power BI Desktop and Connect to the Dataset

First, make sure you have generated the built-in usage report for at least one report in your target workspace. This is the step that makes the "Report Usage Metrics Model" dataset available.

1. Open a new, blank file in Power BI Desktop.
2. In the "Home" tab, click on Get Data. From the dropdown, select Power BI datasets.
3. A pane will appear on the right, listing all the datasets you have access to. Find the one in your desired workspace named Report Usage Metrics Model. Select it and click Create.

You’ve now established a live connection to the usage data for that workspace. All the information that feeds the built-in report is now available for you to use however you wish.

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Step 2: Explore the Data Model

In the "Data" pane on the right-hand side of Power BI Desktop, you’ll see the tables and fields from the dataset. Take a moment to look at what you have to work with. You'll typically find tables like:

• Reports: Contains information about the reports themselves, like ReportName and ReportId.
• ReportPages: Includes details about a report's pages, like ReportPageName and ReportPageNumber.
• Users: A list of the users, containing fields like UserPrincipalName (their email) and DisplayName.
• Dates: A standard date table for slicing and dicing your data over time.
• Audit: This is the main fact table containing the log of every single view action, including who viewed what and when (ViewDate).

This rich data model is the key to unlocking powerful custom insights that go way beyond the default report.

Step 3: Build Your Custom Visuals

Now for the fun part. You can start creating charts and tables just like you would with any other data source. Here are a few examples to get you started.

Example 1: Top 10 Most Viewed Reports in the Workspace

This visual answers the fundamental question: "Which of my reports are the most popular?"

1. Select a Stacked bar chart from the Visualizations pane.
2. From the Audit table, drag ReportViews to the "X-axis" well. ReportViews is an implicit measure that counts rows in the audit table.
3. From the Reports table, drag ReportName to the "Y-axis" well.
4. To limit this to just the top performers, go to the "Filters" pane. Under the filters for this visual, expand ReportName. For "Filter type," choose Top N. Show top 10 items, and for the "By value" field, drag in ReportViews from the Audit table. Click "Apply filter."

You now have a clean bar chart showing your most popular reports across the entire workspace.

Example 2: Most Popular Report Pages

This helps you understand which specific pages or tabs within a report are getting the most attention.

1. Add a Donut chart to your canvas.
2. Drag ReportPageName from the ReportPages table to the "Legend" well.
3. Drag ReportViews from the Audit table to the "Values" well.
4. Add a Slicer visual from the Visualizations pane. Drag ReportName from the Reports table into the slicer. Now you can click on a specific report to see a breakdown of its most-viewed pages.

Example 3: Viewership Trend Over Time

Is usage growing, shrinking, or staying flat? A line chart answers this perfectly.

1. Select a Line chart visual.
2. From the Dates table, drag the Date field to the "X-axis".
3. From the Audit table, drag ReportViews to the "Y-axis".

You’ll immediately see a trend line showing total report views per day. You can use the hierarchy on the date field to toggle between daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly views.

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Step 4: Publish Your Report

Once you are happy with your custom usage dashboard, save it and publish it back to your Power BI service workspace. Now you have a centralized, shareable report that tracks usage across all other reports, automatically refreshing with new data.

Final Thoughts

Creating usage reports in Power BI gives you essential feedback on the work you're producing. By moving beyond the simple built-in report and creating a custom dashboard, you can gather deeper insights, identify your power users, and prove the value of your analytics efforts across your entire workspace.

Power BI is an incredible tool for visualizing and analyzing data from specific systems. But as you’ve seen, even analyzing your analytics requires its own reporting process. For teams juggling data across not just BI tools but also Google Analytics, sales platforms, and ad networks, this manual reporting can become a major time-sink. We built Graphed to simplify this entire process. You can connect all your marketing and sales data sources in seconds and use simple, natural language to ask questions or build real-time dashboards, turning hours of tedious work into a 30-second conversation.