Power Saturday 2019 C5 - Driving Power BI automation through monitoring

@ClubPowerBI @aosComm @GUSS_FRANCEPower Saturday 2019
Power
Saturday
Driving Power BI Automation
Through Monitoring Jan Mulkens

14 et 15 juin 2019, Paris
Power
Saturday

3 communautés pour partager,
échanger et apprendre
Power BI, Data, IA, Power Platform, Office 365, SharePoint, etc.

Merci à nos sponsors
http:// PowerSaturday.com
Silver
Bronze
Gold

The European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference
4 Days 2,500 Delegates 150+ Sessions 120 Speakers
Use code ESPC19SPSP for 10% discount on all tickets
www.sharepointeurope.com

Jan Mulkens
Microsoft BI Consultant
Solution Expert Microsoft Data & AI
User Group & Conference
• Speaker / Newbie mentor
• Organiser

Goals
• Convince you to actively start monitoring your Power
BI environment
• Give you examples of what to monitor for what
reasons
• Give you what you need to start your own automation
journey

Not A Goal (today)
Write code live to show all of this fancy
stuff
Reason:
It takes way too long for 60min

Evaluations

What will we cover

The Story

Company: WorldImporters
– Power BI Business case
– Compliance Issues
– “Do The DevOps”
= Automate Everything
Sigh, I know, I know …
At least they’re automating things

Reasons for not monitoring Power BI?
– Didn’t know it could be done
– Can’t get access to the data
– Unsure how to process all the data

Chances are
•Vous etes emmerdé
Now you’re here to know
•Si "c’est difficile" et "risqué"
So you know
•Si ca marche on change rien

Usage metrics

Usage Metrics Model

Usage Metrics Model
http://radacad.com/usage-metrics-or-do-it-yourself-power-bi-monitoring-
report

Audit Logs
To The Rescue

What’s logged?
– Daily Activity
– Admin tasks
– Errors
– Security
– Data Security

Daily Activity (1/3)

Use cases (1/2)
• Who has been using Power BI?
• What departments?
• What licenses do they have?
• Find very active people
• They can be your “Power BI Champions”
• Segment users
• Creators vs consumers
• Advanced users: parameters, dataflow, …

Use cases (2/2)
• Who doesn’t use apps yet?
• Who deleted that report?
• Find usage patterns
• What reports should be made migrated to SSAS?
• Which datasets are seeing a lot of usage

Admin tasks (1/3)

Admin tasks (2/3)

Admin tasks (3/3)

Use cases
• Which users are publishing directly from Desktop?
• Think: Automated Deployment Pipeline
• Premium: Who/which/when workspaces migration to
capacity?
• Who’s configuring our Premium capacities?
• Who’s changing scheduled dataset refreshes

Errors

Security

Use cases
• Who’s mucking about with settings?
• Who’s getting data from on-premises
• Data Gateway
• Files
• Who downloaded a pbix file?

Data Security (1/2)

Data Security (2/2)

Use cases
• Which users are exporting/printing reports?
• Who’s changing data sources?
• Sharing reports/dashboards/…?

Things to remember
– Latency of 30 Minutes
– Logs are kept for 90 days maximum
– Logs contain sensitive data
– Use a service account to pull the logs
– Set up a scheduled job to import
(and monitor the job)

Goals:
• Convince you to actively start monitoring your Power BI
environment
• Give you examples of what to monitor for what reasons
• Give you what you need to start your own automation
journey

Setting up
Audit Logging

Overview
• Enable audit logging on tenant
• Configure permissions
– View-Only Audit Logs
– Audit Logs
– Compliance Management
– Organization Management

Enable Audit Logging
• Set-AdminAuditLogConfig
-UnifiedAuditLogIngestionEnabled $true
Or use the webinterface at
protection.office365.com…

Audit Logs (via powerbi.com)

Configure permissions
protection.office365.com

Configure Audit logging
– Enable/configure audit logging
• Should “soon” be active by default
• https://docs.microsoft.co/securitycompliance/search-the-audit-
log-in-security-and-compliance
– Managing Role Groups
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/manage-role-groups-
exchange-2013-help

The Goods

Getting The Audit Log Data
You need an exchange online license for this!

Sample of data returned
– aka.ms/PBIAuditlog

Sample of data returned
– The real gold is in the JSON

Got The Data, Now What?
• Import the data in your data warehouse
• Or in Power BI Dataflows
• Model the data
• Build your own reports on the data
• …

What about automation?

Automation is
Writing
Scripts
Having Data

What Scripts Should I Make?
It depends TM
– Look at the organizational needs
• Automated report permission matching
• Reschedule dataset refreshes based on usage
• Alerts on exporting/sharing to web of certain data
– Look at your daily tasks
• Automatically undo certain poweruser/admin actions
• Block people who spam comments

1) Do you really know what’s happening in your tenant?
You don’t, and that should scare you.
Imagine the consequences if security is set wrong on an app or a report.
2) Start slow to finish strong.
Start with a simple use case: rebuild the built-in usage report.
Slowly add more and adjust your audit reports.
3) Automation: 2 steps forward, 1 step back
Automation isn’t a magical step you take. It’s a journey you start.
Weird situations will pop up, API’s will change and things will fail so set expectations!
4) Show and tell!
Show everyone what you did!
Explain how this saves you and others time and increases reliability.
Remember to stay open for feedback and improvements.
And openly thank everyone for their efforts and the support they provided
Next steps: Implementing Audit Logging

Resources

Resources: Learn PowerShell

Resources: Power BI Monitoring
Power BI Audit Log Documentation
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-admin-auditing
Aaron Nelson’s blog (2019/02/22)
http://sqlvariant.com/2019/02/quick-blog-foreach-result-by-day/
Reza Rad’s blog (2019/02/29)
http://radacad.com/build-your-own-power-bi-audit-log-usage-metrics-across-
the-entire-tenant
Interesting Twitter thread on monitoring (2019/02/25)
https://twitter.com/Rad_Reza/status/1100210977939673088

Resources: Power BI API Scripting
Announcing APIs and PowerShell Cmdlets
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-apis-and-powershell-cmdlets-for-power-bi-
administrators/
Microsoft Power BI Cmdlets
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/power-bi/overview
Microsoft Power BI PowerShell samples
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/powerbi-powershell
Power BI PowerShell Modules by DevScope
https://github.com/DevScope/powerbi-powershell-modules
Using Power BI Audit Log and PowerShell to assign Power BI Pro
licenses
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/using-power-bi-audit-log-and-powershell-to-assign-
power-bi-pro-licenses/

Resources: Full solution
Full solution will be published at
https://janmulkens.be/power-bi-monitoring/

Contact Info
Jan@JanMulkens.be

Merci!

Power Saturday 2019 C5 - Driving Power BI automation through monitoring

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Power Saturday 2019 C5 - Driving Power BI automation through monitoring

Similar to Power Saturday 2019 C5 - Driving Power BI automation through monitoring (20)

More from PowerSaturdayParis

More from PowerSaturdayParis (18)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Power Saturday 2019 C5 - Driving Power BI automation through monitoring