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Gain insights into your app users’ activity

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Applies to: White circle with a gray X symbol. Workforce tenants Green circle with a white check mark symbol. External tenants (learn more)

The Application user activity feature under Usage & insights provides data analytics on user activity and engagement for registered applications in your tenant. You can use this feature to view, query, and analyze user activity data in the Microsoft Entra admin center. This can help you uncover valuable insights that can aid strategic decisions and drive business growth.

Tip

Try it now

To try out this feature, go to the Woodgrove Groceries demo and start the “Application user activity” use case.

Supported scenarios

You can use the user insights feature for the following scenarios:

  • Tracking active users - You want to determine the total number of active users in your tenant. This can help you assess the overall user engagement with your applications.
  • Monitoring new users added - You want to track and identify how many users have been added to your tenant in the last month. This data is valuable for monitoring the growth of your user base.
  • Analyzing daily and monthly application sign-ins - You want to gather data on the number of users who sign in to your applications on a daily and monthly basis. This can help you gauge user engagement over time and spot trends.
  • Assessing MFA usage success and failure - You want to compare the multifactor authentication (MFA) usage success and failure rates for your applications. This can provide insights into the security and user experience of your authentication processes.

Prerequisites

To access and view data from application user activity, you must have:

How to access the Application user activity dashboards

The Application user activity dashboards provide insights into how users interact with your apps. You can access them from the Application user activity menu.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least a Reports Reader.

  2. If you have access to multiple tenants, use the Settings icon in the top menu to switch to the external tenant you created earlier from the Directories + subscriptions menu.

  3. Browse to Identity > Monitoring & health > Usage & insights

  4. Select Application user activity to view the dashboards.

    Screenshot of the Application user activity dashboards under the Usage & insights menu.

Browse the available dashboards

There are three dashboards available with data centered around users, requests, and authentications. Each dashboard provides a summary of activities in applications with one or more sign-in attempts. The dashboards display activity data during the selected time range.

Users dashboard

The Users dashboard gives you a summary of daily and monthly active users, and new users that have been added to your tenant. For this dataset, you'll be able to view the following trends:

  • Daily active and inactive users over a period of 30 days.

  • Monthly active users over a period of 12 months

  • Monthly active users comparison by application.

  • New users added over a period of 12 months.

  • New users breakdown by operating system.

    Screenshot of the Users dashboard.

Requests dashboard

The Requests dashboard gives you a summary of monthly requests for all your applications. For this dataset, you'll be able to view the following trends:

  • Monthly requests over a period of 12 months.

  • Types of MFA usage with a summary of success vs failure count over a period of 12 months

    Screenshot of the Requests dashboard.

Authentications dashboard

The Authentications dashboard gives you a summary of daily and monthly authentications in your tenant. For this dataset, you'll be able to view the following trends.

  • Daily authentications over a period of 30 days.

  • Daily authentications breakdown by operating system.

  • Monthly authentications over a period of 12 months summarized by location.

    Screenshot of the Authentications dashboard.

Customize your dashboards

The Application user activity dashboards provide easy-to-digest graphs and charts but have limited customization options. These dashboards are available in the Microsoft Entra admin center and accessible via Microsoft Graph APIs, which are currently in beta.

Microsoft Graph APIs enable you to build powerful, customized dashboards that you can tailor to your specific needs and preferences. This has some advantages:

  • Flexibility: You can integrate with other data sources to present your data in a way that aligns more with your business objectives.
  • Enhanced visualization: You can have richer and more interactive visual representations of your data.
  • Complex query handling: You can apply advanced filters, aggregations, and calculations to your user insights data and get more granular and accurate results.

To build your own user insights dashboard, you need to configure API permissions for Microsoft Graph. You can then use the Microsoft Graph API to access the data and build custom reports in your preferred analytics tool. We recommend using Power BI to visualize the data, but you can choose any other analytical tool you prefer.

Configure API permissions

To build your own user insights dashboard, you need to configure API permissions for Microsoft Graph and add the Insights-UserMetric.Read.All permission to your registered app.

Screenshot of requesting API permissions.

You also have to generate a client secret and get an access token to interact with Microsoft Graph.

Once you have successfully created your access token, you can use the Microsoft Graph API to access the data and build custom reports.

Create a custom Power BI report

To fetch the user insights data you can create a Power BI report using custom connectors. Here's how you can do it:

  1. Create a new blank Power BI report.
  2. Create a custom connector and enter the URL for the Microsoft Graph API endpoint you want to query. For example: https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/reports/userinsights/monthly/activeUsers for monthly active users data.
  3. Add your access token by selecting Advanced.
  4. In the HTTP request header parameters (optional) section, select Authorization in the drop-down list and enter your access token.
  5. Select OK to connect Power BI to the Microsoft Graph API and load the data.

Screenshot of adding a token.

Power BI comes with Power Query Editor that can help you clean and shape your data. You can remove unnecessary columns, handle missing values, and apply transformations such as merging, grouping, filtering, and many more. For more information, see the Query Editor overview.

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