Blog - Our Power BI Insights Tool

When you work with Power BI, the goal is not only to gain new insights into your data to support data-driven business decisions. You also want to make the most efficient use of the capacity allocated for this self-service system. Harvesting information about system utilization would help avoid any drop in performance and pay for redundant resources and licenses. However, there is an unforeseen and often overlooked problem with this approach that sabotages the very purpose of this exercise.

In performance monitoring, various questions arise: How many workspaces are in V1 versus V2? How many members are in each workspace? Do we assign separate roles, or do all workspace users have the administrator role? To answer these questions, scripts are written to extract specific data and report on it.

Depending on your question, you will most likely use a different tool to get information about your usage, capacity, licenses or activities. As a Power BI administrator, you'll use the Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics application to analyze capacity, while the systems engineer will harvest licensing information from Azure Portal. Each workspace also provides usage metrics, and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center contains recent activity. All of these tools add value to their perspective.

But this is where a problem arises. Since these tools are designed to be used exclusively for this specific purpose, they only provide information about this specific area. None of them allow cross-use/filtering/analysis of this information in a single view. Inevitably, many scripts for both reports and questions are run concurrently and outdated reports continue to require resources. As a result, you are certainly wasting resources unnecessarily.

For proper governance, you also need to know which reports are most useful to you. Which ones do you use most frequently? Which ones are distributed more widely, and are of interest to more people? Naturally, identifying which reports are most useful to you allows you to invest in them. This is where you want to get the best performance, excellent modeling and real-time accuracy.

You also need to know which reports do not add value. Are other reports answering similar questions? Which reports are obsolete?
Do you have the opportunity to optimize, replace or cut out certain elements?

After all, you're investing resources to keep those less-than-useful reports... You're wasting valuable time and performance, and maybe even paying for redundant subscription licenses or more capacity.

Are these the questions your business, data or IT stakeholders are asking? Probably not.

The lack of governance and information is usually highly neglected, resulting in an inefficient outflow of resources that no one cares about. Appropriate governance only becomes available when knowledge about the entire environment is available.

With these challenges in mind, Micropole developed the Power BI Insights tool.