Govern and Monitor Your Power BI Deployment with Power BI

You have Power BI, now what? With any new technology implementation, there are going to be some challenges to overcome such as how are you going to govern and monitor it. Luckily, you just deployed a new tool that can help you with that.

Article originally published February 2022

Implementing modern Business Intelligence (BI) tools continues to be a hot trend across all industries. Companies are quickly realizing they need improved reporting and analytics that are automated, provide improved visuals and drive quicker business insights. Microsoft Power BI is the market leader as it provides flexibility, horsepower, and advanced functionality all at an affordable price point.

However, with a new Power BI deployment comes challenges. A few of these can be:

  • The number of new dashboards is growing out of control

  • Newly created reports are getting little usage

  • Different dashboards are providing different versions of the truth

  • Report performance is sluggish

  • Users don’t understand the data they are looking at on the new dashboards

  • Little to no relevant training on the dashboards

Smartbridge is a Microsoft Power BI Partner

Below are a few Power BI dashboards that can help businesses/users manage the above challenges.

govern power bi
govern power bi
Power BI Audit Dashboards

The above Power BI Audit dashboards provide admins, developers, and managers the ability to:

  • See quick KPIs such as the number of workspaces, datasets, reports, users, operations, and the total number of requests.

  • Track the usage of each report, workspace, dataset, app, etc.

  • Determine which datasets and reports are not getting used and may need to be retired.

  • Provides metrics such as most used reports, time of data refreshes, consumption methods, etc.

  • Track peak usage times by item to help with preventative maintenance and ensure dashboard responsiveness.

The dashboard, which is connected to data in a document management system, leverages data power flows and enables organizations to improve resource allocation and prioritization.

govern power bi
Data Dictionary

This Data Dictionary report is really a report of reports. It leverages metadata from multiple reports/sources through automated feeds from both APIs and Azure Data Factory (ADF). This new governance dashboard enables businesses to:

  • Provide a lineage view of workspaces, datasets, and reports.

  • Provide definition of datasets, dataset fields, and measures (calculations) that reside in each workspace.

  • Allow the users to identify which views/tables are being utilized as well as the attributes of those views/tables for each dataset.

  • Provide developers with quick view of the calculations for each Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) measures.

  • Provide the business with a consolidated master listing of KPIs as training material and help improve data consistency and accuracy across all the Power BI dashboards.

Governance and monitoring are a vital part of an effective BI deployment. Building some of these directly with Power BI enables users to get access to the training material, data catalogs, and quickly understand where to go to get the insights they need. Power BI has the ease of use, the tools, and can be leveraged to help keep your deployment running smooth.

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