How to Enable Usage Metrics in Power BI

Ever spent hours creating the perfect Power BI report, only to wonder if anyone is even looking at it? You can stop guessing and start knowing. This article will show you exactly how to enable and use Power BI's built-in usage metrics to see who is using your reports, how often they're being viewed, and which parts are most popular.

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What Are Power BI Usage Metrics?

Power BI usage metrics are a built-in feature that offers a pre-made analytics report on the consumption of your dashboards and other reports. Think of it as analytics for your analytics. Instead of flying blind, you get concrete data about user engagement, helping you understand the impact and value of the content you create and publish.

But why should you go through the trouble of tracking this? The benefits are surprisingly practical:

• Justify Your Work: You can demonstrate to stakeholders or management that the reports you're building are being actively used, proving they're an essential business tool.
• Identify Important Content: Discover which reports are the most viewed. This tells you what your audience finds most valuable, helping you prioritize future updates and projects.
• Find Unused Reports: Conversely, you can identify content that gets little to no traffic. This might be an opportunity to retire outdated reports, consolidate information, or ask a team why they aren’t using a tool designed for them.
• Improve Report Design: The metrics can show you which specific pages within a report are viewed most. If your most important KPI is on page 4 but everyone stops at page 1, it’s a clear sign you need to redesign the layout.
• Understand Your Audience: See which departments or individuals are your power users. You can also see how users access reports — primarily on the web, through a mobile app, or another method — which helps you optimize the format and design.

Understanding the "New" vs. "Classic" Usage Metrics Reports

When you enable usage metrics, you'll be using what Power BI calls the "modern" or "new look" report. Years ago, there was an older, "classic" version that was much more rigid. While you might occasionally see the old version mentioned in outdated forum posts, the modern report is the standard today and the only one you should be concerned with.

The key difference is what happens behind the scenes. The modern usage metrics feature automatically generates a Power BI dataset that logs all the user activity for a specific report or dashboard. The usage report you see is simply a standard Power BI report built on top of that specific dataset.

This is fantastic news for a few reasons:

• It's Fully Customizable: Since it’s just a standard Power BI report, you can edit it, add new visuals, change filters, and create new measures — just like any other report you build yourself.
• Connect with Power BI Desktop: You can connect directly to the underlying usage metrics dataset from Power BI Desktop to build a completely custom, multi-page analysis from scratch.
• Better Performance Data: The modern dataset includes information about report open times, allowing you to identify slow-loading reports and troubleshoot performance issues.

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Step-by-Step Guide: How to Enable and View Usage Metrics

Getting your first usage report up and running only takes a few clicks. Before you start, make sure you meet the basic requirements:

• You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.
• You must have admin, member, or contributor permissions within the workspace where the report is located. Viewer roles cannot create usage reports.

Once you've confirmed that, you're ready to go.

Enabling Usage Metrics for a Report

The process is straightforward. Here’s how you do it in the Power BI Service:

1. Navigate to the workspace containing the report you want to track.
2. Locate your desired report from the list. You can do this from the main content list in the workspace or the lineage view.
3. Hover your cursor over the report title and click the More options (...) menu.
4. From the dropdown menu, select View usage metrics report. It’s usually located near the bottom of the list.

The very first time you do this for any given report, Power BI will take a few moments to generate the usage report and its underlying dataset. Once it's ready, the report will open automatically.

After its initial creation, the new usage report is saved directly in your workspace. You’ll see it in your content list named "Usage Metrics Report - [Your Original Report Name]". The same goes for the dataset. From now on, you can access it directly without going through the original report's menu.

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Breaking Down the Default Usage Metrics Report

The out-of-the-box usage report that Power BI creates gives you a solid overview of user activity. It usually consists of a single page summarizing the last 90 days of activity. Here’s what you can expect to see and what it means:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

At the top of the page, you'll see several key metric cards. These are your at-a-glance health indicators.

• Total Views: This card shows the total count of report opens. If one user opens the report five times, this will count as five views.
• Total Viewers: This shows the number of distinct users who have opened the report. If one user opens it five times, this count will still be one. It's a great metric for measuring audience reach.
• View rank: This metric ranks your report's popularity against all other reports in your organization that you have access to. It’s a simple way to see if your report is one of the more popular ones.
• Views in the last 30 days: A card showing the 30-day view trend, often including a sparkline to represent the daily activity.

Charts and Visuals

The rest of the report breaks down this data in more detail:

• Report Views by Date: A simple line or bar chart showing how many times the report was opened each day over the last 90 days. It's great for spotting trends, like spikes after an email announcement or dips during holidays.
• Unique Viewers by Date: Similar to the above, but tracks the number of distinct users each day.
• Views per user: A table that lists individual users and how many times each has viewed the report. By default, it's sorted to show your "power users" at the top. Note: Your tenant admin can choose to anonymize this data if there are privacy concerns.
• Platform: A pie or donut chart showing how people are accessing your report: via the Power BI Service (website), Mobile (iOS, Android), or Embedded (in SharePoint, Teams, or a custom app).
• Report Pages Viewed: This might be the most valuable visual on the page. It’s a bar chart showing how many views each individual page within your report has received. This is your guide for optimization. If nobody is clicking on page two, maybe that content isn't useful or the navigation is unclear.

Going Deeper: How to Customize Your Usage Metrics Report

The standard report is a great starting point, but the real power comes from customization. Because the usage report is a standard Power BI file, you can treat it as a template for building a much more powerful analytics solution.

Here’s the recommended workflow to create your own custom usage report:

1. Open the auto-generated Usage Metrics Report in your workspace.
2. As a best practice, save a copy. Go to File > Save a copy and give it a new name, like "[My Report Name] - Custom Usage Analysis." This ensures the original, auto-generated report remains intact if you want to refer back to it.
3. You can now edit your new report copy directly in the Power BI Service. Add new visuals, change chart types, rewrite DAX measures, or update the theme and colors to match your brand.

For even greater flexibility, you can connect to the usage dataset from Power BI Desktop:

1. Open a blank Power BI Desktop file.
2. Click Get Data on the Home ribbon and select Power BI datasets.
3. A window will appear listing all the datasets you have access to. Find the dataset associated with your usage report — it will be named something like "Usage Metrics Report - [Your Original Report Name]" — select it, and click Create.
4. You now have a live connection to the underlying usage data. From here, you can build a comprehensive, multi-page report from scratch, combining data, building complex visuals, and creating insights tailored to your exact needs.

Ideas for Custom Reports:

• Filter out your own views from the charts to get a cleaner picture of user activity.
• Create date slicers that allow you to analyze trends over a specific week, month, or quarter.
• Add a card that calculates the average number of views per viewer to see how "sticky" your report is.
• If you have another data source with employee information, you could potentially merge it to analyze usage by department, role, or region.

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Things to Keep in Mind: Limitations and Best Practices

While extremely helpful, usage metrics come with a few guardrails you should be aware of:

• 90-Day Data Window: The underlying dataset only retains the last 90 days of usage data. You can't use it for year-over-year historical analysis directly.
• Up to 24-Hour Delay: The usage data is not real-time. It can take up to 24 hours for the latest activity to be processed and appear in your reports.
• Audience Engagement, Not Data Quality: Remember, the metrics tell you if people are looking at the report, not whether the data inside it is accurate or if they are making good decisions with it.
• Privacy is Paramount: Usage reports can contain user names and email addresses. Always handle this information responsibly. Tenant admins have the power to anonymize user data at the organization-wide level, so if you see GUIDs instead of names, that setting is likely enabled.

Finally, always pair your quantitative data with qualitative feedback. If you notice a critical report isn't getting views, don't just assume it's bad. Talk to the department it was built for. Maybe they don't know it exists, need more training, or the KPIs are no longer relevant to their goals. The metrics tell you what's happening, people tell you why.

Final Thoughts

Enabling usage metrics in Power BI transforms report development from a guessing game into a feedback-driven process. By analyzing who views your reports, which pages they engage with, and overall trends, you can make smarter decisions to refine content, prioritize work, and ultimately deliver more value to your audience.

While Power BI's built-in metrics are fantastic for understanding dashboard engagement, the real challenge for many teams is getting all their disparate marketing and sales data into a single, cohesive view in the first place. That’s why we built Graphed. Our platform allows you to connect sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce in seconds, then use simple, natural language to ask for visualizations and build live dashboards. It's the fastest way to get from raw data to actionable insights without the steep learning curve.