Launching a dashboard is an important milestone, but the real value only appears when people use it consistently to support decisions. Without visibility into adoption, organisations risk measuring delivery rather than impact.

01The background

Power BI has made it easier for organisations to turn data into dashboards and reports. As adoption grows, however, the number of workspaces, datasets and reports can expand quickly.

That growth creates a new challenge. Publishing content is highly visible, but what happens after publication is often less clear. Are employees returning to the dashboard? Which reports support daily decision-making, and which are ignored? Are users exporting the data and continuing their analysis elsewhere? And are Power BI licences assigned to people who actively use the platform?

02The challenge: no consolidated view

Native Power BI usage metrics provide a valuable starting point, but they are largely tied to individual workspaces or content, and the built-in reports retain only a limited window of historical data. Platform owners, however, need a broader perspective across the complete Power BI environment.

Without that consolidated view, it is hard to analyse adoption trends over time, compare activity across workspaces, or spot inactive content and unused licences. Governance then becomes reactive: decisions about training, report retirement, platform investment and licence allocation are based on assumptions rather than evidence.

03The solution: one view across usage, inventory and licences

Dries Cornelissen and Lucas Verschuere developed a reusable Power BI Usage Monitoring solution that combines data from three complementary sources.

Fabric notebooks collect the data incrementally and store it in Delta tables in a Lakehouse. Because the Activity Events API has a limited historical window, scheduled ingestion gradually builds a reliable usage history while preventing duplicate events.

dbt then transforms the raw data into consistent facts and dimensions in a Fabric Warehouse. A semantic model and Power BI report make the resulting insights available to report owners, governance teams and platform administrators.

How the data flows

Fabric notebooks

Incremental, scheduled ingestion from the three APIs

Lakehouse

Raw events in Delta tables, building history without duplicates

dbt

Transforms raw data into facts and dimensions

Fabric Warehouse

Consistent, query-ready usage model

Semantic model and Power BI report

Insights for report owners, governance teams and admins

04Three perspectives on Power BI adoption

The report brings together three connected views, each serving a different audience.

Together, these views give the whole organisation a shared, evidence-based picture of Power BI adoption.

05From monitoring to continuous improvement

Usage monitoring should not become another dashboard that is reviewed only occasionally. Its real value lies in turning insights into concrete actions:

• →Contact users when adoption begins to decline.
• →Improve or retire reports with limited usage.
• →Investigate recurring exports and spreadsheet dependencies.
• →Prioritise training for teams that are not adopting available content.
• →Review licences associated with prolonged inactivity.
• →Direct development effort towards dashboards that support real decisions.

A dashboard going live is not the finish line. It is the start of the feedback loop.