Power BI audit logs: track activity across your tenant
Power BI audit logs record what people do in the service: who viewed a report, who exported data, who shared a workspace. Administrators use them to answer security questions and to measure adoption. There are two sources, the Power BI activity log and the Microsoft Purview audit log, and they overlap. This guide explains the difference, shows what each one records and sets out a simple way to keep the history.
- Two log sources
- Exports and shares recorded
- History kept longer
Last updated
What do Power BI audit logs record?
Each entry describes one event. It names the user, the time, the activity and the item involved. For example, an entry may show that a person viewed a given report in a given workspace.
The range of activities is wide. Viewing, creating, editing, deleting, sharing, exporting and printing all appear. So do admin actions, such as changing a tenant setting or adding a user to a workspace.
There are limits, however. A log entry says that someone opened a report. It does not say which filters they chose or what they concluded. Also, entries take a little time to arrive. Therefore the logs suit review after the fact, not live monitoring.
Activity log and Purview audit log compared
Both hold Power BI events, but access and scope differ.
| Aspect | Power BI activity log | Purview audit log |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Power BI and Fabric events | Events across Microsoft 365 |
| Who can read it | Fabric administrators | Users with audit roles in Purview |
| Main access route | Admin API or PowerShell | Purview portal search or API |
| Typical use | Adoption and usage analysis | Security and compliance review |
| Retention | Short, set by Microsoft | Depends on license and policy |
How long is activity history kept?
Not long, in the case of the activity log. Microsoft keeps it for a limited number of days and documents the exact window. After that, the entries are gone for good.
So any team that wants trends has to save the data itself. The usual answer is a small scheduled job. It calls the admin API each day, downloads the previous day's events and stores them in a database or a lakehouse.
Once that store exists, reporting becomes easy. A Power BI model on top shows active users, popular reports and unused content over months. As a result, decisions about licenses and clean-up rest on evidence. We set this up early in most governance projects.
What teams learn from Power BI audit logs
Three uses justify the effort of collecting the data.
Adoption
View counts per report and per department show which content earns its keep.
Risk
Export and sharing events then reveal where data leaves the platform most often.
Clean-up
Reports with no views over a long period become candidates for archiving.
How to collect Power BI audit logs in four steps
These four steps turn a short-lived log into a lasting record.
Confirm the roles
First make sure the account that will read the log holds the Fabric administrator role.
Schedule the download
Then set up a daily job that requests the prior day's activity events from the admin API.
Store the events
Next write the results to a database or lakehouse, with one row per event.
Report on the history
Finally build a usage model over that store and share it with workspace owners.
Questions about audit and activity logs in Power BI
Who can read the audit logs for Power BI?
The Power BI activity log is open to Fabric administrators. The Purview audit log needs an audit role in Microsoft Purview, which a compliance team usually holds. Ordinary report authors cannot read either one. They can, however, see usage metrics for their own reports inside the workspace.
Are Power BI audit log entries switched on by default?
Microsoft turns on auditing by default for most organizations today. It is still worth confirming in the Purview portal, since older tenants or special policies may differ. The activity log needs no separate switch. We verify both during a governance review, before anyone relies on the data.
Can the Power BI logs show who exported data?
Yes. Export events are recorded with the user, the time and the report or visual involved. So an admin can list who exported from a sensitive report in a given week. The entry does not contain the exported rows themselves. It tells you that an export happened, not what the file held.
Is the usage metrics report enough?
For a single workspace, often yes. It shows views and viewers for the reports in that workspace over a recent period. But it does not cover the tenant, and it holds limited history. For organization-wide questions, the activity log is the right source.
Can you set up log collection for us?
Yes. It is a small, well-defined piece of work. One of our consultants builds the daily job, the store and a usage report in your tenant. Power BI Agency belongs to Sataware Technologies and is independent of Microsoft. We agree a fixed scope in writing and hold a demo each week.
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