Knowing what reports are the most viewed and the ones that aren't even opened up at all across the whole tenant can be a very important piece of information. In the report usage metrics we can even see how many views a page got but this model is locked down and I cannot really query it.
What if I want to do get everything?
Can we somehow get all the raw data incl. the report page views?
Here are my options:
All options include Power BI reports and Paginated Reports
Activity logs | Report usage metrics | Measure Killer | |
|---|---|---|---|
Report views | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Page views | No | Yes | Yes |
Scope | Tenant | Workspace | Tenant |
Free/Paid | Free | Free | Paid |
Coding required? | Yes | Yes | No |
Well structured for export? | Yes | No | Yes |
Current data? | Yes | Partially | Yes |
Permissions required | Tenant admin | workspace | workspace |
Since we want to get report and page views for all reports in our tenant, we will show what the tool Measure Killer provides and how we can work with this / export it.
The other options are either hard to query (report usage metrics) and only gives us data per workspace. Or, like with the Power BI / Fabric logs, they can be queried easily but do not include page views.
Requirements:
-Version 2.6 or later is required of Measure Killer
-Make sure you have a paid license or request a free trial here
-You need to have at least contributor permissions in your workspaces
Run either one of the Tenant Analysis modes
The difference between the two modes is that the one on the left only requires workspace level (contributor or higher) permissions. The one on the right needs tenant-admin.
What will be the difference?
If you run the "admin" one, you can also get the report and page views for workspaces you do not have access to, even though you might be tenant-admin.
I will run "Limited Tenant Analysis"
First I will need to authenticate with my Microsoft account
Now I will see a list of workspaces I have access to and can choose for which ones I want to get the report and page views.
Multithreading (option at the bottom) will speed up the analysis but could also lead to your computer freezing for a second or so (since it would consume all cores).
After a few seconds, I will end up in the main window of the tool.
This will allow me to select individual reports, models, dataflows etc.
We only care about reports because we want to get the report and page views. I can select "Type" in the search bar on top and enter "report" as a text. I also need to turn on "Search all levels" as shown below.
Now I can hit "Select all" and then "Run" on the top left. It will only scan the reports.
As you can see in the screenshot above, we can now get the views for the last 30 days for all Power BI and Paginated reports. And when I open the pages (see hierarchy on top left) I can even see the number of views per page.
Obviously this can also be exported to provide unique insights into report page consumption within our Power BI or Fabric tenant.
When I export all this information as a .json file from Measure Killer, I can reuse it in any tool or in my case put it back into Power BI.
The easiest way to open the file is using the .json connector in Power BI desktop or Dataflows
By default the table will look something like this, Power Query will apply some automatic transformations which are fine in our case.
Our table will show all reports incl. one row for every page in our report.
Click on the column all the way on the right and "Expand to new rows".
Then click on those two arros again and click on ok.
That way we will get two new columns with the date and the total number of views for that date (per page.
You can request a free trial here to get started.
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