Using usage reports

Usage for reports and dashboards are surfaced with the help of reports that are generated by the Power BI service. Usage metrics reports can be generated by selecting the View usage metrics report under the menu button for each report or dashboard, as shown in Figure 14.14:

Figure 14.14 – Menu for a Power BI report

Usage metrics reports are generated by the Power BI service and at the time of writing contain data going back 30 days of usage history for new workspaces. When these reports are generated by the service, they create Power BI datasets and are accessible via the built-in reports as well as through the Analyze with Excel capability of Power BI. This allows for customization of reporting from the dataset.

Usage metrics reports include how many times reports are used or opened, unique viewers of reports, total report page views and by date, how end users arrived at the reports (via the workspace, shared from another user, or via an app), the time it takes for reports to open, the overall performance for the day and week, which web browsers are used, and many other metrics that are key to understanding the usability and value of the reports to the end users.

Usage metrics reporting requires Power BI Pro or PPU licensing to view. However, usage data is collected for all users of the reports. Additionally, Power BI administrators can enable or disable usage metrics for content creators, and per-user data also needs to be enabled in the admin portal.

Refining and improving your Power BI solutions requires a good understanding of how users are using the content available to them. Usage metrics reporting is an easy-to-use and helpful way of gathering these insights.

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about managing workspaces in Power BI.

We learned how user roles work in workspaces and how roles provide a way to manage users and groups within a workspace to ensure proper access and permissions are available to users as needed. We also learned how workspaces can have different kinds of licensing that will enable different advanced or enterprise capabilities. We learned that workspaces can be assigned different amounts of resources for hosting in a Premium capacity.

We learned how workspaces can be packaged as a Power BI app, which helps end users find and utilize the content created in reports and dashboards. Apps provide a way to curate content and distribute it among organizational users.

We also learned how software development best practices can be implemented using deployment pipelines. We learned that deployment pipelines use the basic unit of organization provided by workspaces.

Lastly, we discovered how important it is to understand and use the usage metric capabilities of the Power BI service to gain insights into how end users use the content being created in Power BI. Understanding how users use content is key to improving over time and providing the right value for the needs of the organization.

In the next chapter, we will look at how we can apply some best practices to managing Power BI datasets.