Whether you want to analyze your personal “My Workspace” environment, your gateways, or all workspaces and solutions you are an admin of, you will find the Power BI Workspace Metrics solution invaluable. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE AN ADMIN with this product – just an admin of the workspaces you want to analyze!
Until now, the Power BI Capacity Metrics solution was the only real solution provided for this functionality but it is only available for Premium environments. What do you do if you want to document or analyze your solutions in non-Premium environments? You would have to develop a solution like this from scratch. You still can – don’t get me wrong. This product just gives you a huge head start on that development and costs much less than the hours it would take to do so. It even has some capabilities that the Power BI Capacity Metrics solution does not.
It is a fully functional data model – joining all Power BI artifacts to be able to see lineage, relationships, types of data sources utilized, alignment to gateways, ownership, etc. It also has all of the metrics and visuals built out to easily analyze your Power BI environment.
If you want to connect to the Power BI API and build this solution yourself, you very well can. You just need to create an Azure Active Directory Application and download some freely available connectors and/or utilize various methods to skirt around the OAuth2 authentication protocol (I will include links below) and you can begin connecting to your Power BI environment. In order to build reporting, you have to do some hi-jinks and jump through some hurdles (and be pretty good at M) in order to build out a functioning model.
- Power BI REST APIs
- Register an Azure AD application to use with Power BI
- https://prathy.com/2017/09/calling-power-bi-api-using-power-bi-desktop-to-document-power-bi-service/
- https://prathy.com/2017/12/power-bi-template-to-document-the-power-bi-service/
- https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2018/11/13/openapi-power-bi-rest-api-m/
- https://github.com/migueesc123/PowerBIRESTAPI
- https://www.thebiccountant.com/2019/09/24/power-bi-administration-easy-power-bi-rest-api/
But, believe me, it takes dozens to hundreds of hours to build out a solution like this – not even mentioning the documentation that is required to make a product presentation ready for sales.
If you have the time, I encourage you to go for it. It is an experience building something like this that is so valuable to an organization or to individuals like me. I want my Power BI solutions and environment (Pro or Premium) to be fully optimized. I thought:
- There has to be a way to see all of my solutions I have access to.
- There has to be a way to easily filter to find all solutions by owner ( in this case, the person who imported/created the dataset).
- There has to be a way to see all of those refresh schedules in a single view.
- There has to be a way to see refresh history and performance over time.
- There has to be a way to marry those two things to show how many datasets are scheduled to refresh or are still running at a specific time so I can intelligently select an optimal refresh time for a new solution.
- There has to be a way to view all failed refreshes that have run today so I can proactively resolve issues.
- There has to be a way to review lineage and see all solutions aligned to a specific data source in the case there is a production issue.
I have built a product that does these things and more!
Take a look at the product and see if it would be valuable for you or your organization. It is available on vizbp.com:
While there, take a look at other solutions people like me are making available for free or for purchase. Take a look at becoming a seller yourself and offering your solutions in the marketplace.
While here, take a look at my other articles related to vizbp.com:
- Why I started vizbp…..
- Why buy from vizbp?
- Why sell with vizbp?
- Product Information for Power BI Workspace Metrics