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Category: Power BI

Reporting on Power BI Report Usage

Published 2020-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers looks at the outputs of Get-PowerBIActivityEvent and visualizes them for us:

I have been working on implementing changes with the new PowerShell script Get-PowerBIActivityEvent from the Power BI team.

One of the awesome things is that I noticed that there are some additional fields in the data extract. This then allowed me to be able to provide additional reporting insights. For example, which reports, and dashboards are consumed via an App!

If you’re in a Power BI-heavy shop, this could be quite useful information.

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Using ACLs to Secure Azure Data Lake Data

Published 2020-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche takes us through access control lists (ACLs) in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and how they apply to Power BI:

Earlier this week I received a question from a customer on how to get Power BI to work with data in ADLSg2 that is  secured using ACLs. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew who would know, and I looped in Ben Sack from the dataflows team.Ben answered the customer’s questions and unblocked their efforts, and he said that I could turn them into a blog post. Thank you, Ben!

Read on for the answer.

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Getting Folder Names in Power BI

Published 2020-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows us something new in Power Query:

There are times that you need to get the list of FOLDERS and not just files. Of course folder itself (without considering files in it), doesn’t contain data to be used for a report. However, sometimes, even the folder name might contain some useful information. The Get Data From Folder option in Power BI will just give you a list of files. There is a little trick that can help you to get a list of folders. Let me show you how.

There’s a fair bit to it, so click through and read the whole thing.

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Refreshing Power BI from Your Outlook Calendar

Published 2020-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a nice use for Power Automate and Outlook:

The ideal way to view when multiple events are scheduled is a calendar and we’ve got great calendar functionality in Outlook. What if you could schedule refresh of your datasets from a calendar in Outlook? It turns out to be easier than you might think! Here’s how.

Read the whole thing, including Chris’s warning not to put it into production. You wouldn’t want the person with all of those calendar entries to leave your company and have things suddenly break, after all.

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Why Use Aggregations in Power BI

Published 2020-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge has five reasons why you should use Power BI aggregations:

A lot has already been written on aggregations and it is one of the most exciting features of Power BI in a while. The guys at SQLBI did a session on it and my colleague Phil Seamark wrote an amazing host of articles with many details and tips and tricks on it. So why another article? Most people think aggregations is only applicable to petabyte scale data sets. That doesn’t have to be the true though, in this blog post I wanted to give my take on it and why it might be applicable to your current, smaller, model.

Read on for those reasons.

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Learning About the Power BI Activity Log

Published 2020-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes us through the new Power BI activity log:

What is this activity data, and how is it valuable?

The audit/activity log data contains details for every interaction that users in your tenant have with the Power BI service (powerbi.com). Activities such as viewing reports, publishing apps, modifying gateway data sources, changing workspace security, and dozens of others have records broken out by user and timestamp.

Using this data, organizations not only know who does what and at what time. You can move beyond a simple audit trail to measure how well Power BI adoption is progressing at your enterprise. In this case, adoption targets for a group’s collective number of touchpoints can be compared to the actuals obtained from the logs—even down to the individual object level. Using the logs in this manner by combining actuals to targets, BlueGranite often finds underutilized reports or other opportunities to improve adoption.

Read on for more info about what it does, how it differs from the Office 365 audit log, and more.

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Monitoring Power BI On-Premises Gateways

Published 2020-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Pries shows us how we can monitor Power BI Enterprise Gateways:

To tie all of these steps together, I put together a brief C# console application which is capable of using stored credentials or prompting for credentials interactively, then performs the 4 steps listed above. Finally, the application receives the JSON response and de-serializes it and outputs it in a friendly way to the screen (or optionally inserts it into a SQL database table.

For the basics on how I perform the authentication and API query in the application, see my blog post here.

There are a few more steps than I would have anticipated.

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Getting a List of Power BI Pro Licensed Users

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Powell shares a Powershell script to retrieve Power BI Pro licensed users:

Per the Power BI licensing documentation, a pro license is required for publishing and editing content in app workspaces. If the app workspace is not assigned to a premium capacity, even the users viewing/consuming the content will require a pro license.

Pro license assignments are also very important from a governance perspective. An organization that has provisioned premium capacity would generally want to limit the number users with pro licenses to users who A) have a clear need for developing and publishing Power BI artifacts (dashboards, reports, dataflows, datasets) on an ongoing basis and B) have received some form of training or certification on using Power BI effectively as well as the organization’s policies for using Power BI.

As one (very) simple example for an organization with premium capacity, two users in a department of ten could be determined to be the content creators for their department – perhaps one will build datasets and the other will build reports and dashboards. These two users, along with maybe a backup user, could be assigned pro licenses. Other users on the team without a pro license could still make development and test related contributions to their team’s projects via Power BI Desktop and the Viewer workspace role but they would rely on the pro users in their department for publishing and distributing content.

Click through for the script and a detailed explanation.

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Drillthrough in Power BI

Published 2020-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Cecilia Brusatori takes us through Power BI’s drillthrough capabilities:

The drillthrough feature in Power BI will let you let you go into more detail about a specific column in a visualization.

In the most simple way, you can enable a feature that will let you right click on a visual containing the specified column, and take you to a whole different page inside your report where you created more content to provide more details related to that same column.

Click through for an example.

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Time Series + Power BI Aggregations

Published 2020-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson answers a couple of questions around aggregations and time series in Power BI:

I have received a couple of questions about Aggregations in Power BI and whether they can be used to cover time series calculations such as Year to Date, Quarter to Date, and Month To Date. The answer is yes. Since time series calculations break down into calculations over a series of days, an aggregation table defined at day level with the basic summarization methods (min, max, sum, count) and the right relationship with a Date dimension, can answer Year to Date, Quarter to Date, and Month To Date calculations.

Let’s take a quick look at one such calcualtion and how it can be covered with an aggration. I am going to use the same version of AdventureWorks sample database and Power BI model that I used in my previous blog post on aggregations, with a few changes.

Read on for a demonstration.

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