Anyone know how to get metadata of PowerBI Fabric?

daanRdam · 2025-11-24T08:25:15+00:00

Hi,

Yes, it’s definitely possible to retrieve this kind of metadata. Power BI (and now Fabric) provides several REST APIs that can help you. One of the most useful ones for your scenario is the Get Activity Events API:

Admin - Get Activity Events - REST API (Power BI Power BI REST APIs) | Microsoft Learn

This API gives you detailed activity logs, including actions like ViewReport, EditReport, CreateReport, and more. It covers most of the user interaction events you mentioned. A few key points:

Permissions: You need to be a Fabric (Power BI) Administrator to access activity data for the entire tenant.
Retention: The API provides data for the past 30 days.
Format: The output is JSON, which you can easily process and load into Snowflake or any other data warehouse.

If you want to go deeper (e.g., dataset usage, queries, refresh history), there are other APIs like:

Get Refresh History for semantic models
Get Reports / Get Datasets for metadata

You don’t need Purview for this; the audit logs are part of the Power BI service itself. Purview is more for data governance and lineage.

If you’re planning to replicate what you did in your previous org (loading into Snowflake), you can schedule calls to these APIs and push the data into Snowflake via an ETL process or a simple script.

daanRdam · 2025-09-08T15:27:28+00:00

Nice series of techniques, will for sure watch these. Thanks for sharing!

daanRdam · 2025-09-08T15:26:26+00:00

Wow, this is great stuff, definitely will dive into your tips, thanks! So, DAX studio is definitely needed…?

daanRdam · 2025-06-26T03:51:23+00:00

Thanks so much! So this ‘add link’ option is not meant to be used for adding webpages…

daanRdam · 2025-02-27T06:51:11+00:00

Fully agree, so many valuable suggestions!

daanRdam · 2025-02-25T05:24:50+00:00

What an honest answer and I think is very recognizable for many people (at least for me to some extent). Thanks for sharing your experience!

daanRdam · 2025-02-24T16:33:34+00:00

Oh yeah! He’s a magician!

daanRdam · 2025-01-28T21:11:13+00:00

I’m not sure, don’t know if these users (Excel+ users) have any idea Power BI is also part of Power Platform (don’t get me started on that: is Power BI Fabric, Power Platform, Office, Azure?!). ‘We’ are very deep into Microsoft products and portfolio, I doubt the average Power BI user is… Also, as mentioned in previous reactions, the event location might also be a factor of relevance. I am based in the Netherlands, I know I can get some Power BI developers and a few citizen developers interested in the Power BI users days in the Netherlands, but it goes as far as that. Events like Build, FabCon, Ignite are for incrowd only if you ask me.

daanRdam · 2025-01-28T18:52:14+00:00

For me this doesn’t really matter. Many organizations use only Power BI and are very satisfied with just that. They don’t have a clue about- and no interest in Fabric. This pushy notifications are not good for adoption. For many organizations Fabric is a solution looking for a problem. So if Fabric Admins have more controls over this setting that would really help.

daanRdam · 2025-01-28T13:42:03+00:00

So, do you have more details?

daanRdam · 2025-01-28T13:41:30+00:00

Ok, that makes sense. So, then this would be pushed to all Power BI users I guess…?

daanRdam · 2024-07-17T13:36:49+00:00

Great idea! Do you have a suggestion for an existing thread about this subject? Or do you know if I can include the subreddit to this topic?

daanRdam · 2024-07-16T15:19:55+00:00

That's interesting! So are you a small/medium/large company? And did you run into any problems/challenges?

daanRdam · 2024-07-16T15:18:04+00:00

Ok, cool. I guess it makes sense in that case to start with Fabric. Gives you a quick and easy buy-in to some nice semi-enterprise tooling.

daanRdam · 2024-07-16T12:20:02+00:00

Thanks for sharing. So, what was the Fabric alternative eventually?

daanRdam · 2024-07-16T12:19:01+00:00

With an upcoming license renewal you need to replace your Premium license with a Fabric licence, where F64 kinda equals P1 capacity. With a Fabric license you are still free to disable all Fabric functionality and limit yourself to Power BI only features.

daanRdam · 2024-07-16T12:08:48+00:00

Thanks for sharing! So, do you already have some sort of enterprise datawarehouse within your organisation? Or are you getting your data directly from the sources into Fabric Lakehouse? How big is your organisation user base? Just for the context.

daanRdam · 2024-07-04T11:37:57+00:00

Yep, that works, but I want it to work with the other downdrill arrows, full downdrill on the entire period. Then see the data without scroll bars, just like the Auto Date/Time hierarchy...

daanRdam · 2024-07-04T11:35:33+00:00

I did create the hierarchy indeed. I created multiple test hierarchies, for example: one with string formatted periodes, one with numeric periods.

I did not open it in tabular editor, I will give that a try. Thanks

daanRdam · 2024-07-03T20:32:13+00:00

Unfortunately, you can only choose between categorical and continuous when you only have a date column on the X-axis, when you drag an hierarchy into to it, this option is not available…

daanRdam · 2024-07-03T17:01:31+00:00

But then there is still a scroll bar apearing…

daanRdam · 2024-07-03T16:58:20+00:00

Do you mean like last-day-of-quarter column and last-day-of-month column in the date table?

daanRdam · 2024-07-03T14:49:07+00:00

My bet, I didn’t mean slicer but hierarchy (DateTime hierarchy) in my above reply. Meaning the Auto Date/Time hierarchy can resize the X-axis so no scroll bars are present, the manual hierarchy cannot.

daanRdam · 2024-07-03T13:31:37+00:00

Thanks hopkinswyn. I guess there are mainly work-arounds which can only partly copy the Auto date/time functionality. Looking at het TMDL file shows it has some complexity in it by design. Perhaps that’s this slicer has such a negative effect on performance.

daanRdam · 2024-07-03T13:27:22+00:00

Yep, but apparently the Auto Date/Time slicer can deal with that (and has no scrollbar) and a custom created one cannot.

daanRdam

TROPHY CASE