Jeff Pries

SQL Server, Power BI, and other Business Intelligence and data technologies

Month: February 2020

Usage Monitoring with the Power BI API – A Power BI Report for Tenant Usage Data

February 7, 2020 /

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been putting together a series of posts on how to connect to the Power BI Rest API programmatically to extract inventory and usage data from the service.

Most of those posts (listed at the bottom of this page) are fairly long and technical — as, initially getting started using a program to read Power BI data via the API can be a bit much.

This post is going to be a bit different. Short and sweet. The payoff for all that hard work authenticating to Power BI, requesting data, downloading that data, and storing it in an easy to use SQL table.

With all of the hard work out of the way, its time to build a Power BI report to explore that great Activity Log usage data.

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Usage Monitoring with the Power BI API – Tenant Usage Data with Power BI Activity Log (C# and PowerShell)

February 2, 2020 /

A common task for a report developer when learning SSRS and managing your first Reporting Services environment is to access the Report Catalog and ExecutionLog tables in the Report Server SQL database to extract report inventory and usage information.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to do something similar in Power BI — list all of my reports and which ones are used the most and least (and by whom) across all of my workspaces, but due to the nature of the Power BI Service (specifically not having a local and easily accessible juicy SQL database to mine for data) it’s been a much tougher nut to crack.

Recently, I posted a blog on my experiences learning how to query the Power BI REST API in a programmatic way using a C# console application. Expanding on this I could answer a number of report and dataset inventory questions, but now I needed usage data to go along with it.

For some time now, Microsoft has made Power BI Usage data available through the Office 365 Audit Log, but this required special Office 365 permissions outside of Power BI to use. Just recently, however, Microsoft released the Power BI Activity Log, which is a Power BI specific interface into the Office 365 Audit Log data which pertains to Power BI. This means that only Power BI (Service Admin) privileges are needed and the data can be accessed via the Power BI PowerShell cmdlets or via the Power BI Rest API!

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