Admin Monitoring within Power BI

Out with the old, in with the new

If you are a Power BI tenant admin within your organization, you’ve more than likely explored the configurations and settings with the Admin Portal. The Admin Portal is an essential part of setting up a governance strategy for Power BI by controlling what features can be utilized throughout the organization. Along with tenant settings, it also allows you to manage workspaces and allocate capacity resources.

The one element that has always been lacking within the Admin Portal is the usage metrics. While this may not necessarily seem important because usage metrics can be generated at the report/workspace level, there has never been a great way to see organizational-level usage of reports and datasets. The Admin Portal technically has a usage metrics section which features a dashboard – but it’s fairly antiquated and not particularly useful.

Microsoft recognized this and decided to shift from the usage metrics view (this feature will be turned off in 2024) and move to an entirely new workspace called Admin Monitoring.

What features are available in the Admin Monitoring workspace?

Before we discuss what’s contained inside of the Admin Monitoring workspace, it’s important to point out its location. From the left navigation pane inside of the Power BI Service, click on the Workspaces icon – in the list of your workspaces, Admin Monitoring will be above My Workspace. If it doesn’t appear similar to the screenshot below, it means that you are not a Power BI admin within your tenant:

Inside of the workspace there will be two reports (with corresponding semantic models) that we’ll explore individually: Feature Usage and Adoption & Purview Hub

Feature Usage and Adoption

As the name suggests, this report is focused on inventorying all of the workspaces, apps, reports and dashboards throughout the organization while tracking which users have been interrogating various elements within the past 30 days. There are three components to the report:

Activity Overview

• Displays a trend of daily activity to get a sense of overall adoption for the platform
• The activities are broken out into a separate chart to show how users are commonly interacting with the platform (report opens, data exports, editing dataset, etc.)
• Each of the visuals contains the ability to drill through to an Activity Details page which contains line items details to show which activities were performed by whom

Analysis

• Provides an exploratory view of which activities are being performed using a Decomposition Tree visualization
• This visualization allows you to dynamically build your analysis based on whatever elements are deemed important

Inventory

• The layout of the Inventory tab is very similar to the Analysis tab, but focuses instead on cataloging reports and workspaces throughout the organization
• It also features a Decomposition Tree for dynamic exploration

Purview Hub

The intent of this report is to better understand the utilization of data governance best practices within Power BI – which is likely why it’s named after Microsoft’s data governance solution, Purview. Two foundational data governance practices within Power BI are Sensitivity Labels and Report/Dataset Endorsement. Purview Hub helps to identify which reports in the organization are in need of sensitivity labels (Confidential, PII, etc.) as well as reports that have been promoted, endorsed, or have no endorsement.

Why is Admin Monitoring important?

Without Admin Monitoring, there really isn’t an effective way to understand how your organization is utilizing Power BI as a tool – measuring adoption and success would be largely anecdotal-based. Being able to identify usage patterns at a macro level can help to determine the organization’s current state or reporting and potentially dictate future investment in the tool. In addition to the macro-view, it will indicate which reports and user groups have strong adoption and other groups that may need additional support for engagement.

Bonus Items!

Leverage the Semantic Model

Let’s say you’re interested in the underlying usage metrics metadata, but don’t particularly like the way it’s displayed in the out-of-the-box dashboard – what can you do? Like any traditional Power BI report, the Feature Usage and Adoption report is attached to a semantic model. Admins have the ability to create their own report, leveraging this semantic model. It’s certainly worthwhile to check out because there are additional data points that are captured in the data model that didn’t make their way to the pre-canned report.

Integration with Microsoft Fabric

If your organization is utilizing Microsoft Fabric (either paid or free trial), all of the activities tied to data ingestion, data transformation, etc. are all being captured in the usage metrics as well. This will help you to monitor anyone who has access to these features and see what functionality is typically being used.