Power BI Audit Dashboard

Purpose

The User & Activity page provides visibility into overall user engagement and activity trends within Power BI workspaces. This page helps identify how users interact with Power BI assets and services.

Key Questions Answered

• What are users doing within Power BI?
• How engaged are users within specific workspaces?
• What activity types are occurring most frequently?

Incorporated fields include:

• Activity counts by user and workspace
• Activity-specific trends, including:
  • Content creation
  • Report viewing
  • Report exporting
  • Modifications and deletions

As a Power BI Architect, it is important to identify users with unexpectedly high levels of activity, such as:

• Excessive exporting
• Large numbers of report views
• Frequent content modifications
• Mass sharing events

These patterns may indicate that further investigation is needed to identify training needs so that potential data governance concerns can be addressed in a timely manner. Possible training opportunities may focus on:

• Recommended Power BI practices
• Guidance on workspace organization
• Sharing or publishing standards based on Northwestern's guidelines

The User & Activity page can also be used to monitor growth in user engagement and identify organizational areas with:

• High adoption
• Low engagement
• Emerging usage trends

Purpose

The Sharing Info page focuses on how Power BI content is distributed throughout the organization. This page provides visibility into sharing behavior and potential governance risks.

Key Questions Answered

• Who is sharing content?
• How is content being shared?
• What is the scope of sharing activity?

Incorporated fields include:

• Shared reports and dashboards
• Internal versus external sharing
• Publish to Web activity
• Organization-wide sharing

Power BI Architects are tasked with monitoring data-exposure risk. This includes identifying content that has been shared broadly across the organization and verifying that these sharing activities align with Northwestern's business requirements and security policies.

It is also important to review Publish to Web activity. Power BI Developers publishing reports externally should:

• Obtain appropriate approvals
• Ensure that sensitive information is not exposed
• Follow Northwestern's Data Governance guidelines

Power BI Architects can also investigate unusual sharing activities by analyzing:

• Sudden increases in sharing volume
• Sharing from Personal Workspaces
• Sharing across unexpected audiences
• Broad organizational sharing without clear business justification

In summary, the Sharing Info page helps Power BI Architects:

• Monitor sharing activity and sharing patterns
• Investigate suspicious or non-compliant behavior
• Promote secure sharing practices
• Facilitate Publish to Web governance and approval processes

Purpose

The Workspace Users page provides insight into workspace ownership, membership, and access permissions. It enables Power BI Architects to ensure that workspaces are administered appropriately.

Key Questions Answered

• Who is using each workspace?
• Who owns the workspace?
• What permissions are assigned?

Incorporated fields include:

• Workspace owners and architects, if applicable
• User membership and assigned roles

Validating workspace ownership is a crucial step for identifying workspaces that:

• Lack clearly defined ownership
• Have outdated ownership assignments
• Require succession planning

Power BI Architects should review security access and verify that workspace members' access rights match business responsibilities and organizational structures by detecting workspaces with:

• Excessive administrator assignments
• Overly broad membership
• Role configurations that do not align with Northwestern's governance standards
• Designs that do not align with organizational and data-domain structures

Purpose

The Workspace Content page provides visibility into the assets contained within each Power BI workspace and helps architects understand how content is organized and managed.

Key Questions Answered

• What content exists within the workspace?
• What semantic models or datasets are being used?
• What capacities are supporting that content?

Incorporated fields include:

• Reports, dashboards, and dataflows
• Semantic models
• Capacities

Sometimes it can be difficult to organize workspace content. Power BI Architects can help ensure that appropriate content is stored and accessed within workspaces by identifying:

• Empty workspaces
• Duplicate content
• Obsolete assets, such as outdated reports, dashboards, and dataflows
• Unused capacities

If a report, dashboard, or dataflow appears to have exceeded its current resources, it may be time to pursue capacity planning. Assigning capacities can help optimize performance and manage resource consumption for content with a large memory footprint by assigning additional SKUs to manage memory and load.

In summary, the Workspace Content page can be used to:

• Ensure workspaces support reporting requirements
• Maintain appropriate workspace structures
• Align workspaces with organizational data domains
• Support long-term platform scalability and governance needs

Architects should perform periodic reviews using the Power BI Audit Dashboard to answer the following questions:

User Activity

• Are users actively engaging with Power BI content?
• Are any unusual activity spikes occurring?

Sharing Governance

• Is content being shared appropriately?
• Are Publish to Web requests properly governed?
• Are sharing practices compliant with institutional standards?

Workspace Management

• Does every workspace have an accountable owner?
• Are access roles assigned appropriately?
• Are permissions aligned with least-privilege principles?

Content Governance

• Are workspaces organized according to business domains?
• Are obsolete assets being removed?

What is the primary purpose of the Power BI Audit Dashboard?

The report provides governance and oversight capabilities for monitoring user activity, content sharing, workspace administration, and content management throughout the Power BI environment.

Who should use this report?

This report is primarily intended for:

• Power BI Architects
• Power BI Administrators
• Data Stewards
• Governance Teams
• Reporting Leaders

How often should audit data be reviewed?

Periodic reviews are recommended to ensure content remains accurate, relevant, and compliant with governance standards. Annual reviews are specifically mentioned in the dashboard guidance.

How can this report help with Publish to Web governance?

The Sharing Info page can be used to identify external publishing activity and support approval and review processes to ensure adherence to governance and security requirements.

How can architects use this report to improve security?

Architects can:

• Review sharing activity
• Audit workspace permissions
• Validate ownership assignments
• Monitor access controls
• Identify non-compliant sharing behavior

What should I do if I find a workspace without an owner?

The workspace should be reviewed and assigned an accountable owner to ensure ongoing governance, access management, and support responsibilities.

This recommendation aligns with the report's focus on workspace ownership visibility and governance oversight.

What types of Power BI activities are tracked?

The audit model tracks Power BI activities such as content creation, deletion, sharing, exporting, viewing, workspace management, and user access activity.

How does this report support governance programs?

The report centralizes audit information needed to evaluate platform usage, sharing practices, workspace administration, compliance, security, and organizational adoption of Power BI.