One of the features of Power BI Service is usage metrics report on a dashboard or report. The usage metrics report will give you an analysis of how many times the content is viewed or share, through which platforms, and by which users. You can also create your own monitoring report based on the model of usage metrics. In this post, I’ll explain how easy is to use the usage metrics, or even creating your own report from it. If you want to learn more about Power BI, read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Usage Metrics

The usage metrics report in the Power BI service will give you some analysis on the views and shares of the Power BI content. This report can be turned off or on in the Power BI Administrator tenant setting configuration. You can also choose if you want the individual per-user data analysis for that to be visible or not, this configuration can be also determined in the tenant settings.

The report has a number of sections which mainly explains to you how users consumed this report, you can slice and dice by Distribution methods (sharing, workspace), or by Platform (Mobile, Web). The report gives you an overall analysis as well as a per day analysis.  Here is a look and feel of a usage metrics report;

You can access the usage metrics report by clicking on the Usage Metrics icon;

Do It Yourself!

You can create your own version of usage metrics report if you want. You just need to use the existing model and build visualization on top of it. To start, you need to create a copy of the usage metrics report. For doing this, open the usage metrics report, and then click on File, and Save As

Save the new report with a different name, and then open it. You can now see and click on the Edit option on the top of the report

When you go to Edit mode, then see the tables and fields in the dataset that has the monitoring information.

You can even remove the existing Report level filter to bring monitoring data for all reports and dashboards.

Everything after this step depends on your creativity to create your report with whatever visuals you want. Here is an example of usage metrics report version I have created in few minutes;

As you can see the report include all dashboards. I can click on a dashboard in the slicer, and see the detailed monitoring analysis of that content.

Summary

This was a very quick post about using the Usage Metrics report in Power BI service or even creating your own version of the monitoring report.

Reza Rad

Trainer, Consultant, Mentor

Reza Rad is a Microsoft Regional Director, an Author, Trainer, Speaker and Consultant. He has a BSc in Computer engineering; he has more than 20 years’ experience in data analysis, BI, databases, programming, and development mostly on Microsoft technologies. He is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP for 12 continuous years (from 2011 till now) for his dedication in Microsoft BI. Reza is an active blogger and co-founder of RADACAD. Reza is also co-founder and co-organizer of Difinity conference in New Zealand, Power BI Summit, and Data Insight Summit.
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.