Challenges

As a large, international organization, the customer employed Power BI users across different countries. The customer had a Power BI tenant sharing millions of users, which created dataset size challenges. These dataset size challenges resulted in logs that were too big to transfer and analyze.

Due to the dataset size, they were unable to access data from the Office 365 audit log. As a result, they had concerns about governance of their Power BI tenants, user licensing, and data exportation creating security issues.

Solutions

Instead of using Azure SQL to pull from Office 365 via a logic app, as per our out-of-the-box design for the Power BI Usage Insights template, Neal Analytics customized our solution using table storage and incremental loading to:

• Store the data
• Surface the data to Power BI

This enabled implementation of our Power BI Usage Insights solution which provides information management for telemetry through one, standardized “pane of glass”. Our approach helped overcome big data problems that resulted from the customer having more than a million monthly active users of Power BI on one tenant all creating telemetry data.

Results

Neal Analytics successfully overcame big data challenges to scale our Power BI Usage Insights solution for the customer, providing them with access to all telemetry information from the Office 365 audit log as well as comprehensive, scalable, and well-designed reporting for key areas of insight across the entire organization.

The solution was scalable and cost-efficient, able to store and surface data based on the Neal team’s innovative data access approach. The reporting provided by Power BI Usage Insights delivered new insights into where the customer’s Power BI consumption and where spend come from, enabling the customer to make more effective decisions, manage their organization better, and prevent data exportation security issues.