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Analyzing what is going on in personal workspaces in Power BI

Aktualisiert: 26. Sept.

Introduction

Personal workspaces of users are a bit of an unknown for tenant admins. Every user has them since there is no way of restricting their creation. We also have trouble seeing what is inside them since granting access is not that straight forward.

There is an option in the admin panel but that only lasts for 24 hours.

Personal workspaces pose additional security risks since reports could be shared with users within our tenant and we would never know.


What can we do about this?


Option 1 (manual approach):

To check personal workspaces we have the option of granting ourselves access to a personal workspace in the admin portal. But there are multiple problems.

Power BI admin portal - granting access to personal workspaces
Power BI admin portal - granting access to personal workspaces

Problem 1: With this approach you have to grant access to every single personal workspace individually. This can take a long time in a big organization with hundreds or thousands of users.


Problem 2: You might not be able to download a report. There are some limitations imposed by Microsoft.

Power BI Service - being unable to download a report
Power BI Service - being unable to download a report

Problem 3: If you want to check access to reports and who they are shared with you need some automation as well.

 

Power BI external tool Measure Killer can run a tenant-level scan to give you every detail of what is going on in personal workspaces.

The tool can even grant you access to personal workspaces (assuming you run it with your admin credentials) and analyze the reports and access given.


Additionally, you will be able to to access (or get the metadata) of all reports even if you cannot download them using the UI


Another benefit with this approach is that you can also access all the information of the non-downloadable reports in all workspaces, like to the Test_Download report seen above.

Measure Killer Tenant Analysis report output (filtered for personal workspaces)
Measure Killer Tenant Analysis report output (filtered for personal workspaces)

You can get information on visuals, pages and report-level measures.


Additionally, the tool provides you with a full list of individuals or Entra groups who got access to a report within somebody's personal workspace.

All of this information can also be exported from Measure Killer as .json

Measure Killer Tenant Analysis access tab (filtered for personal workspaces)
Measure Killer Tenant Analysis access tab (filtered for personal workspaces)

What if I am curious how much these reports are used? Well since there is an option to easily fetch Power BI activity logs from the last 30 days we can get the number of views for every report as well.

Measure Killer Tenant Analysis reports tab showing report views in last 30 days
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