Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman shows us how to access Power BI log and trace files:
We’ve now identified the process, the amount of memory allocated to perform a task captured in the log, start time and the duration. The information in these log files can assist when diagnosing if Power BI desktop crashes, but the data collected is quite rudimentary.
If you shut down Power BI Desktop, the PBIDesktop* log file writes to the startup file, which was once empty and it then empties and saves off the timestamp of the exit of the program.
The Microsoft Mashup file has much of the same information, but includes deeper level processing work by Power BI, such as work done in the Query Editor or when we create a measure or new column/table.
In the three examples from the file below, you can see a compile, a save and then an evaluate task.
There’s some useful information here for debugging.