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Monitor usage of Power BI semantic models in Excel

  • Article
  • 01/23/2024

If you are a Power BI administrator, you might want to track who is connecting to your organization's Power BI data from Excel to ensure there's no unauthorized access to the data. The Power BI activity logs allows you to monitor the usage of Power BI semantic models and improve your organization's data governance or meet regulatory compliance requirements (where applicable).

Identify users connected to semantic models from Excel

To identify users connecting to Power BI semantic models from Excel desktop or Excel for the web, do the following steps.

  1. Open PowerShell.

  2. Run the Get-PowerBIActivityEvent cmdlet to download event data for the AnalyzedByExternalApplication activity. The AnalyzedByExternalApplication activity identifies users who interact with semantic models published to the Power BI service from an external application. Here's a sample cmdlet for a day's activity data:

    PowerShell 
    Get-PowerBIActivityEvent - StartDateTime '2022-03-15T00:00:00' -EndDateTime '2022-03-15T23:59:59' -ActivityType 'AnalyzedByExternalApplication'

    Screenshot of PowerShell Get-PowerBIActivityEvent cmdlet.

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