App Usage Tracking with SQL DB

The Usage Tracking feature allows you to monitor user interactions within the app. User actions are logged in the AuditAccessLog table in your Reporting Hub SQL database. Records older than 180 days are deleted. The following user actions are recorded:

  • Viewing a report

  • Opening a report tab

  • Clicking on a report visual

  • Accessing an embedded URL page

  • Navigating to a settings page

Usage tracking via the AuditAccessLog table is available with a Commercial license.

This data is not visualized anywhere within your Reporting Hub app at this time, but you can easily create a Power BI report by connecting to your Reporting Hub SQL database.

Report Usage Table: AuditAccessLog

The table that captures your user's report interactions is called AuditAccessLog. It contains the following columns:

Column Name
Description

AuditID

Unique identifier for the row.

UserId

The ID of the user who completed the action.

SessionId

Identifier for the user's session.

NavigationId

OrganizationsId

The organization (tenant) ID. This is a foreign key to the Organizations table.

Pageurl

The URL of the page that was accessed.

ActionTime

The date and time (UTC) that the page was accessed or the report visual was clicked.

ReportId

The GUID of the report. This is the GUID that appears in the URL when you view the published report in the Power BI service.

WorkSpaceId

The GUID of the Power BI workspace where the report resides.

DatasetIds

The GUIDs of the Power BI datasets that were accessed.

ReportPage

The name and display name of the report page that was viewed in the format "PageName [DisplayName]"

VisualName

The name of the report visual that was clicked on. This is usually a non-descriptive ID string.

Connect to your Usage Table

To view the usage data, connect to your Reporting Hub SQL database in Power BI or a SQL client. See Microsoft's documentation on connecting to an Azure SQL Database in Power BI.

You will need a login for your Reporting Hub database. If you don't have one, ask your Azure administrator to create a user on your Reporting Hub database with read permissions. See Microsoft's Create a database user documentation for more information.

Find your server and database name

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

  2. Under the Azure services heading, select SQL databases. If you don't see SQL databases here, use the search box to find it.

  3. Select your Reporting Hub database from the list.

  4. Find and copy the Server name on the Essentials section of the Overview page. The database name is in the top left corner of the page.

Mapping Table Columns

Content Page Names

You can retrieve the content page name associated with an AuditAccessLog entry via the NavigationSetup table (also in your Reporting Hub SQL database). Relate the NavigationId column from your AuditAccessLog table to the NavigationSetupId column in the NavigationSetup table. The content page names (as they appear in your Reporting Hub navigation menu) are in the Title column of the NavigationSetup table.

Tenant Names

You can retrieve the Tenant name for an AuditAccessLog entry via the Organizations table (also in your Reporting Hub SQL database). Relate the OrganizationsId column from your AuditAccessLog table to the OrganizationsId column in the Organizations table. Tenant names are in the OrganizationDisplayName column of the Organizations table.

Power BI GUIDs

The GUIDs in the ReportId, WorkSpaceId, and DatasetIds columns correspond to the unique identifiers (GUIDs) for the Power BI report, workspace, and datasets as they appear in the Power BI service. You can relate these GUIDs to their display names by manually checking the Power BI service or by using the Power BI REST APIs.

To manually find these GUIDs, select a report or dataset in Power BI and check the URL:

  • The workspace GUID is the string between groups/ and the next slash (/) in the URL.

  • The report GUID is the string betweenreports/ and the next slash in the URL.

  • The dataset GUID is the string between datasets/ and the next slash in the URL.

Alternatively, you can use the Power BI REST APIs to retrieve lists of workspaces, reports, and datasets. For more details, see the Microsoft documentation linked below.

Get groups (workspaces) API:

Get reports API:

Get datasets API:

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