When I review the Power BI Audit logs, I am always finding either new operations or new additions into the audit log.

In my example below I found a way to quickly and easily identify Power BI REST API calls that are being used.

If you have not read my prior blog post where I detail how to store the Audit log you can read it here (How you can store All your Power BI Audit Logs easily and indefinitely in Azure) which will allow you to get a copy of the audit logs.

  • I went into the power Query Editor and added the following conditional column with the following logic.

    if [ActivityId] = “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000” then “Power BI REST API” else “Web Activity”

  • This then resulted in the following column once created
  • I then loaded this into my dataset and created the following report as shown below, which showns the use of the Download Report REST API, whom it was run by and the dataset name
  • I could also see overall what REST APIs are being called, which as shown below the peak is every Sunday I export all PBIX files to Azure Blob Storage (Another blog post to follow)

Summary

In this blog post I have shown how I added a new column to my Power BI Audit report, which enabled me to quickly identify Power BI REST API calls, who has been running them and what calls have been made.

If there are any questions or comments please leave them below.

And here is it an awesome 2021!