Yesterday I found out we have a great feature in Power BI that everyone should know about but I stumbled upon by accident. it turns out you can create your own, fully customized, usage reports to share. I found it while going over the documentation right here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-usage-metrics/
So let’s get at it. I created this report:
Now I want to create a report that I can share with the sales team that shows how many users I have on this dashboard. First I click on the “Usage metrics“ at the top
That opens the out of the box report that comes with Power BI, the key here is that I also have ability to do “save as”
This now adds the report to my workspace that I can change how I want it:
But also it adds the Dataset to Power BI (UPDATE: This behaivor has changed as of 2019, the dataset doesn’t get added to the UI any more. The next steps are still possible though so this shouldn’t affect the rest of the post. )
This now allows me to connect to this dataset from PBI desktop as well:
And now I can do anything I want, use my own visuals, add new measures etc
Interesting to note here is that there is a single model for all the reports and another one for all the dashboards per workspace. This allows you to build some comprehensive reporting that you can share with stakeholders around a particular area.
Pretty cool right 
Nice discovery Kasper . thanks for sharing..
Great blog post Kasper.
I did blog about something similar about a month ago, and how to change it between datasets. Really good to get some reporting metrics to understand how and when the reports and dashboards are being used.
https://www.fourmoo.com/2017/07/11/power-bi-using-reports-usage-metrics-to-create-custom-reports-leverage-them-for-other-app-workspaces/
there seems no way to show who the top users are – thats a shame.
yet 🙂
I will put it in the Power BI Ideas, but the dataset should include ALL workspaces in the same report.
This is reporting per workspace, for reporting on all workspaces you need to be Power BI admin. The idea is that this report will also become available there. If you don’t have access to another workspace you should also not be able to see the usage data I think.
Hi,
I was trying to do the same thing, however the dataset is not getting added. Is there anything specific I need to enable to get the dataset?
you shouldn’t have to. Maybe they changed the behavior, let me check.
I’m experiencing the same thing 🙁
I checked with the team, you are correct it doesn’t get added as a dataset anymore but you should see it when connecting from PBI desktop