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Organizations often lack insight into how their employees use dashboards and the costs associated with this. The Power BI Admin tool provides support here. In this article, we discuss the features of this tool and how it can provide valuable insights into dashboard usage within your organization.

What is the Power BI Admin tool?

Organizations often lack insight into how their dashboards are used by employees and what costs are involved. If you know which employees use which dashboards often (or almost never), you can take targeted action based on this. In this context, E-mergo's Power BI Admin tool offers the ability to keep control over the use of your BI environment.

The Power BI Admin tool provides an overview of the workspaces in use and the roles employees have in each workspace. It enables administrators to monitor the BI environment in a structured way.

In addition, you can perform in-depth analyses of report usage, map out activities at various levels, and uncover trends and patterns within them. The Power BI Admin tool also provides an overview of all so-called Azure Active Directory (AAD) groups. With AAD, you can establish user identity and manage access rights. Finally, the Power BI Admin tool maps out the license usage of your BI environment. All of these topics will be covered in detail in this blog.

User activities

First of all, the Power BI Admin tool provides insight into the various workspaces being used. Workspaces in Power BI are virtual locations for collaborating with colleagues to create collections of dashboards, reports, data models, and paginated reports. Workspaces are therefore the hub of your organization, which is why it's essential to understand who has access as a member to which workspaces and with what role.

A deeper level of insight is provided by making the activities per user, report, and workspace visible. This means you can not only observe general trends, but also zoom in on individual contributions.

This is important for measuring the effectiveness of your team, recognizing opportunities for training and development, and allocating resources based on activities that were or were not carried out.

In addition, you can closely track Azure Active Directory (AAD) groups and the employees in these groups. This gives you insight into who has access to your data and how they use it. It helps safeguard security and manage access to sensitive information.

Adoption of Power BI dashboards

Another aspect of the Power BI Admin tool is the ability to examine the actual use of reports by employees, also known as "adoption". Knowing which reports are viewed by which employees is extremely valuable. The Power BI Admin tool shows which reports are used the most and which receive less attention. You can not only measure which reports are visited most often, but also understand the impact on your organization.

With the dashboard, you can make sure data ends up in the right place within the organization. You can immediately see which department values a dashboard the most. And if you see that a dashboard is barely used, you can talk to the users to find out what's causing the low adoption.

Power BI licenses

The Power BI Admin tool also offers the ability to manage your Power BI software licenses. You can track exactly how many Power BI licenses are being used compared to the number of available licenses the organization has already paid for in advance.

Who are the most active Power BI Pro users, and are their current licenses still sufficient? Do all (groups of) business users need a Premium Power BI license to view reports, or would a Power BI Pro license also be sufficient? Why aren't relevant dashboards being used by a specific group of Power BI license holders? These are just a few examples of the critical questions the dashboard can raise.

Conclusion

The Power BI Admin tool provides valuable insights into your users' activities, the adoption of your dashboards, and the use of your Power BI licenses. Based on these insights, you can take targeted actions that will make the BI environment much more efficient to use. Because the Power BI Admin tool identifies bottlenecks in the flow of information, the dashboard ensures your employees always have access to relevant data to make well-founded decisions.