Auditing is one of the recent features in Power BI Preview which can be a great tool for monitoring what is going on in Power BI. There were a number of people who asked for this feature on the Power BI Ideas site, which shows that Microsoft is responding to what is posted there. When I read about auditing, I thought that it was a Power BI feature. While that is true, the scope of auditing is much bigger than Power BI. Auditing is designed for Office 365. Yes, you can turn it on for Power BI, as well as for SharePoint and a number of other Office applications. Since auditing is really an Office 365 tool, one has to be an Office 365 admin to be able to be able to access the tool, as it is turned on from within the Office 365 tenant. To be able to audit anything, you need to wait 24 hours until after it has been turned on to receive any data. It doesn’t go back in time, which is unfortunate as usually you figure out that you want an audit after something happens, and then it is too late. Best to just turn it on now. If you have free users and Pro Users, you will notice that you only get auditing for the pro users.

Accessing the Power BI Audit Log

Clicking on the gear in the upper right corner of the Power BI Service will take you to the Admin portal. If you select audit logs, the screen has a button on it which opens Office 365 Admin Center. Clicking on the search box will show all of the applications which have audit logs. Scroll down to Power BI activities.

As you can see by looking at the available Power BI options, there are a number of options to choose from. If you select the top item PowerBI activities, then everything gets selected. After doing that click outside of the menu for the menu to go away. Select a date and time range of your choosing, select specific users if you wish, then click on the Search button. Depending on how big your date range is, this may take some time to load. Once you see the results, you have the ability to filter as well.

The screen starts responding as soon as you start typing. I got as far as Del, and the screen changed to show only the items Deleted.It’s a pretty neat feature and a simple way to monitor what is going on in Power BI.

I am going to be talking about more methods to administer Power BI at IT/Dev Connections. If you are attending, please come by and say hello. I would love the chance to meet more people who read my blog. For those of you who are not in Vegas this week, I will be posting more information on Power BI and R to provide supplemental material for my sessions. Check back later in the week or please subscribe to my blog for the highlights.

Yours Always

Ginger Grant

Data aficionado et SQL Raconteur