4 min read
Power BI Admin Tool
Organizations often lack insight into how their employees use dashboards and what that usage costs. The Power BI Admin tool helps with this. In this article, we walk through the tool's features and how it can provide valuable insight into dashboard usage across your organization.
What is the Power BI Admin tool?
Organizations often lack insight into how their dashboards are used by employees and what costs come with that. If you know which employees use which dashboards often (or almost never), you can take targeted action. To that end, E-mergo's Power BI Admin tool lets you keep control over how your BI environment is used.
The Power BI Admin tool provides an overview of the workspaces in use and the roles employees hold in each workspace. It allows administrators to monitor the BI environment in a structured way.
You can also run in-depth analyses of report usage, map activity at different levels, and uncover trends and patterns. In addition, the Power BI Admin tool gives an overview of all Azure Active Directory (AAD) groups. With AAD you can verify user identities and manage access rights. Finally, the Power BI Admin tool maps the license usage of your BI environment. All of these topics are covered in detail in this blog.
User activity
First, the Power BI Admin tool gives insight into the different workspaces in use. Workspaces in Power BI are virtual locations where you collaborate with colleagues to create collections of dashboards, reports, data models and paginated reports. Workspaces are therefore the hub of your organization, so it is essential to understand who has access to which workspaces as a member, and with which role.
A deeper level of insight comes from showing activity per user, report and workspace. This means you can not only spot general trends, but also zoom in on individual contributions.
This matters for measuring the effectiveness of your team, identifying opportunities for training and development, and allocating resources based on which activities have or have not been carried out.
You can also closely track Azure Active Directory (AAD) groups and the employees in those groups. This shows you 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 how employees actually use reports, also known as "adoption". Knowing which reports are viewed by which employees is of great value. The Power BI Admin tool shows which reports are used most and which get less attention. You can measure not only which reports are visited most often, but also understand their impact on your organization.
With the dashboard you can make sure data ends up in the right place in the organization. You can see directly which department values a dashboard the most. And if you see that a dashboard is barely used, you can talk to its users to find out why adoption is so low.
Power BI licenses
The Power BI Admin tool also lets you manage your Power BI software licenses. You can track exactly how many Power BI licenses are in use compared with the number of available licenses the organization has already paid for.
Who are the most active Power BI Pro users, and are their current licenses still adequate? Do all (groups of) business users need a Premium Power BI license to view reports, or would a Power BI Pro license be enough? Why are relevant dashboards not 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 insight into your users' activity, the adoption of your dashboards and the use of your Power BI licenses. Based on these insights you can take targeted action, making your BI environment far more efficient. Because the Power BI Admin tool identifies bottlenecks in information provision, the dashboard ensures your employees always have relevant data to make well-founded decisions.
Want to know more?
Want to know more about the Power BI Admin Tool and whether it suits your organization? Get in touch with us or schedule an appointment right away using the buttons below.