We are excited to announce the public preview of Insights! The Insights feature helps users easily find and explore insights such as anomalies, trends, and KPI analysis in their data as they interact and consume their reports. It proactively notifies a user if there are interesting insights in their reports and provides explanations for the insights. It works out of the box on any report so consumers can automatically get insights without any setup or configuration by the creators.
Insights is supported for reports in Premium and Premium Per User (PPU) workspaces. You can also use this capability in non-premium workspaces if you have a PPU license.
When you open a report, Power BI automatically runs insights analysis and shows you toast notifications if there are Top insights for visuals in your current report page. Top insights are those that are noteworthy based on factors like recency, significance. For example, a huge anomaly on the previous day or steep trend in the last week. These notifications are supported only in Premium and PPU workspaces. Please note that the tenant and report setting for receiving notifications should be turned on for this to work.
Clicking on the See insights button opens the Insights pane and clicking on Show me later stops further notifications for this report in the current session. If you usually dismiss these notifications or don’t engage with them, they’ll be disabled for the current session. You can also turn off the Insights report setting to stop getting notifications for that report altogether.
Clicking on Get insights in the action bar opens the Insights pane. The pane shows insights about the current report page, and it updates when you select a different page on the report.
Selecting More options (…) in the upper-right corner of a visual and then Get insights shows you insights about just that visual.
The Insights pane currently shows you three types of insights – Anomalies, Trends, and KPI analysis. The Top tab shows you Top insights and All tab shows you both top insights and other insights. Insights are computed every time you open a report or interact with a report such as changing pages, changing filters, or cross filtering your data.
Clicking on the card shows you more details about the insight and possible explanations.
When an anomaly in your data is flagged, Power BI runs an analysis across different dimensions in your data model to look for spikes or dips in the measure that correlate to the anomaly to show as possible explanations. Check out this documentation to learn more about Anomaly detection feature in Power BI.
Power BI looks at several types of trends such as long trend, steep trend, recent trend, and trend reversal. When a trend in your data is flagged, Power BI looks for and identifies the categories that most influenced the increase or decrease in the identified trend to show as possible explanations. Check out this documentation to learn more about ‘Explain the increase/decrease’ feature in Power BI.
KPI analysis with a target in visuals such as KPI, Guage looks at the variance of the current value to its target, and it’s considered significant if the variance is significantly high or low compared to other segments. Whereas KPI analysis without a target on visuals such as Cards, Bar, and Column charts looks at the value itself and flags ones that are significantly high or low compared to other segments. For explanations, Power BI looks for and identifies the categories that have significantly high or low values.
Please check out the documentation for more details. We appreciate any feedback in terms of what you liked about the feature and how we can improve it! If you have any feedback for the team, please comment on our community post.