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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