Microsoft Power BI can be broken down into different sessions namely the Power BI Desktop, Power BI Services, and Power BI Mobile. Each part of Power BI comes with its individual configuration. One critical feature of the Power BI Service is the Power BI Admin, with all its many privileges.

This article is a continuation of the Power BI Admin setting. We will highlight the various admin settings in the Power BI admin portal, their limitations, and what you can do with such privilege.

Constraints and Limitations of Power BI Admin

Possibility of changing licenses and users inside the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Availability of audit logs.

Usage Metrics

The usage metrics page in the Power BI admin settings allows you to track Power BI usage for your organization. Also, it displays the most active groups and users in your organization using Power BI. You may use this data to gain accurate insights into how employees across your organization are utilizing Power BI report.

Note: It may take a couple of minutes to load when opening the usage metric for the first time. When it loads successfully it will provide you with two sections namely;

a) Usage data for individual users.
b) Usage data for individual groups.

Number of Users

This is the first visual, that appears which gives you a distinct count of all dashboards, reports, and datasets in the user workspace.

Consumed dashboards

This section provides you with the most consumed dashboard by a number of users. The number of users who accessed the dashboards is shown by the tile in the first section.

Consumed packages

This tile gives a breakdown of the most popular content. Anything that users could access through the Get Data method, such as SaaS template apps, files, or databases, is included in the range.

Section B:

This section contains top users based on groups.

Top users or groups based on dashboards

Based on how many dashboards each of your top users has, this tile displays a glimpse of them. Both dashboards they generated and shared with them are included in each entry.

Top users or groups based on reports

This tile shows a view of your top users based on how many reports they have.

Monitor Usage Metrics in New Workspace

This aspect in usage metrics is essential, it helps the developer of the Power BI report know how people in your organization are using the report you created. Thereby letting the developer know if the information or dashboard needs further improvement or should be taken down.

Prerequisites

For the developer to be able to use this feature in the workspace you need to have the following:

Developers should have either a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) License.
The report must reside in a contemporary workspace, and you must have edit access to that report.
The Power BI Admin should have enabled usage metrics for content creators.

View Usage Metric for Report

The following steps should be followed in viewing a particular report created in a workspace:

Step 1:

In your Power BI service, click on the workspace at your bottom left and select the workspace you want to analyze.

Step 2:

In the workspace, click on the 3 dots and select “view usage metrics report” this should take you to the metrics report view.

Step 3:

In the “usage metrics report” at the top right corner click “New usage report on” this will change to the new report. This might take a couple of minutes if you doing this for the first time. By default Power, BI usage metrics shows the show report and you have to manually change it to the newer version.

Step 4:

You will notice at the top left corner of the page, you are provided with 4 new tabs namely; “Report Usage”, “Report Performance”, “Report List” and “FAQ”. Feel free to explore each feature to see what it represents.

Users

Through the Microsoft 365 admin center, you may manage Power BI users, groups, and administrators. Clicking on the “Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center” should take you to the admin center.

In the Admin center, you are provided with different options like adding a user, removing a user, or resetting the password of users. You can also check your license and get billing information.

Premium Per User

The following PPU parameters can be set up in the admin portal’s Premium Per User tab.

Audit logs

For most organizations, the audit feature is an essential task for Power BI admin. It provides the admin with information like how many users are there, and how many users are using the report or dashboard.

Capacity Settings

A specific collection of resources set aside for sole usage is called capacity. These features are of two types Premium and Embedded capabilities.

Power BI Premium

You may manage any Power BI Premium capacity (EM or P SKU) acquired for your company on the Power BI Premium tab. In the event that a user has no permissions, the following message is displayed:

Power BI Embedded

You may view the Power BI Embedded (A SKU) capacity that you have purchased for your customer on the Power BI Embedded tab. You manage embedded capacity in Azure from the Azure interface because you can only buy A SKUs from Azure.

Check the Microsoft Doc for more info on Power BI embedded capability in the Azure portal.

Embedded Code

As an admin, you can view the embedded codes that are generated for sharing publicly by using the publish to the web from the Power BI feature. You can choose to view the report or get rid of the embed code (Deleting the embed code will not delete the report, it will only un-publish it from the web link).

Organizational Visuals

Power BI admin can manage the list of Power BI visuals available in the organization. This feature allows you to add ad remove visuals and decide which visual will automatically display in the visualization pane of your organization.

Add Visual From a File

The following steps listed below will show you how to add visuals from a file.

Step 1:

In your admin portal select “Organizational visuals”, navigate to the Add visual and click on “From a file”.

Step 2:

You are expected to fill in the following requirements.

Choose a .pbiviz file: This represents “Power BI Custom Visual”, to create a .pbiviz file from scratch click powerbi.tips, this takes you to a new window to create visuals. If you already have a custom visual in your local machine all you need to just navigate to the directory.

Visual Name: Give a unique and easy-to-identify name.

Icon: To have an icon displayed in the visualization pane, upload the icon file.

Add Visual From the App

You can also add visuals from the app, which will take you to the Power BI AppSource store.

Workspace

These are containers for dashboards, reports, datasets, workbooks, and dataflow in the Power BI service.

In the Power BI Admin Portal workspace you can perform the following activities:

Refresh the workspace list and its details.
Export the data in a workspace as a .csv file.
Change access to the workspace.
Edit Workspace name and description.

Custom Branding

As an administrator, you may change how Power BI appears throughout your entire organization.

Output on Power BI service home page.

Conclusion

This is the final part of two blog posts, in this article you have learned all about the Power BI administrator role. Each new release of the Power BI service includes updates to the Admin site and tenant settings.

To learn more about Power BI, you should sign up for our classes, keep up with the blog, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Reference

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-portal-usage-metrics

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-portal