Power BI’s mission is to empower every individual, team, and organization to make confident decisions with data. With the increased focus on governance, compliance, and policy, customers need more visibility than ever into workflows and related activities, and Tenant Administrators in particular need to understand adoption and deep dive on such details as active users and artifact activities. The Public Preview release of the Admin Monitoring workspace features out-of-the-box reporting and datasets delivering curated insights and that help you better manage, administer and govern your tenant.
What insights can I get?
The Public Preview release will begin rolling out to customers on May 22, and will be deployed to all regions (except GCC sovereign clouds – details to be provided in a future blog post) by May 23. It includes the Feature Usage and Adoption dataset and report, which together provide tenant admins with insights based on inventory metadata and audit logs, enabling them to:
- understand who is doing what
- track tenant usage and adoption growth
- support audits and ensure compliance
By default, the Admin Monitoring workspace will be available only to Tenant Admins, who can choose to share the workspace or specific reports within it with others in their organization. See here to learn more about sharing reports, and here for information on existing roles and permissions.
The Feature Usage and Adoption report also includes detailed in-product help content to assist you in getting the most benefit from the included data and visualizations.
How can I set up the Admin Monitoring workspace for my tenant?
Tenant Admins should follow these steps to install the Admin Monitoring workspace:
- Log into Power BI with your credentials
- From the left pane, Select Workspaces. If you are a Tenant Admin, the Admin Monitoring icon will appear at the top left, just above My workspace.
- Select Admin monitoring. When you select this option for the first time, Power BI automatically installs the workspace.
This initial release does not require a Premium capacity, and allows Tenant Admins to access insights without any API calls or additional setup required. Please keep in mind the limitations for Workspaces running on Pro, and note that Admin Monitoring provides the greatest benefit when running on Premium.
How can the Out-of-Box report/dataset help you succeed?
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- The Feature Usage and Adoption report provides analytical views built on the Audit Logs to help you understand who is doing what, enabling you to better govern Power BI by identifying specific trends, patterns, and activities. For example, you may discourage direct report sharing from personal workspaces and may want to have visibility if this happens.
- The Feature Usage and Adoption dataset will contain tenant metadata dimensions of most Power BI items as well as Audit Log fact data about asset lifecycle activities such as create, access, modify, and delete. We’ll provide access to a subset of Audit Log data directly through the dataset, so you won’t need Microsoft 365 admin rights to view this audit data.
Note: Audit log retention period for the Feature Usage and Adoption dataset/report is currently rolling 30 days only. - To take advantage of Power BI native support for composite data modelling, the out-of-box dataset can be reused and enhanced with additional data such as user licensing information, artifact lineage, regional or department-specific metadata. This facilitates customized reporting based on individual organizational scenarios.
Next Steps