📊 Automating Power BI Usage Report Backups with Power Automate
Tracking Power BI usage data regularly is critical for understanding user engagement, optimizing dashboards, and auditing access. In this post, I’ll walk you through how we set up an automated monthly backup process using Power Automate to extract and store Power BI usage data for both users and report views.
🔄 Objective
To automate the monthly extraction and backup of Power BI usage data — specifically the Users and Views datasets — and store them in CSV files on SharePoint for further use.
🧠Workflow Overview
Here’s the high-level structure of the Power Automate flow:
Let’s break it down step by step.
🪄 Step-by-Step Breakdown
1️⃣ Trigger: Recurrence
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Action:
Recurrence Users and Views Global Campaign Dashboard Usage Report -
Description: This step triggers the flow on a monthly schedule (you can configure the exact timing).
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Purpose: Ensures the backup runs automatically every month.
2️⃣ Run Queries Against Power BI Datasets
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Actions:
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Run a query against a dataset Users -
Run a query against a dataset Views
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Description: Two separate Power BI Datasets are queried here:
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One for User activity data
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One for Report view data
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Purpose: Pull the most recent usage metrics from Power BI datasets.
3️⃣ Convert the Result to CSV Format
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Actions:
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Create CSV table Users -
Create CSV table Views
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Description: The queried data is converted into a CSV table format using built-in Power Automate features.
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Purpose: CSV is easy to store, download, and analyze later in Excel or other tools.
4️⃣ Save the CSV Files to SharePoint
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Actions:
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Create file Users -
Create file Views
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Description: The CSVs are saved to designated folders in SharePoint.
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Best Practice: Include timestamps in file names for version control, e.g.,
Users_Report_May2025.csv.
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