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We review architecture, governance, adoption and cost, and hand you a roadmap in priority order. Power BI Monitoring, the tool we built during a European retailer's assessment, shows who uses which report and which licence.
What the assessment hands you
Why reports are slow, who owns which report, who has access to what, and which reports nobody opens.
Quick wins first, then the longer fixes, in priority order.
Every licence set against its holder's actual use, and active users who still lack one.
Fixed, quoted before we start.
Architecture, governance, adoption and cost, reviewed in your tenant.
From our Power BI work: a European retail company and the procurement team of a telecommunications company
Data sources, models, refreshes and capacity: where the time goes and why reports are slow.
Workspaces, ownership, access, row-level security and the deployment rules for the report lifecycle.
Which reports people use, which they do not, and where they went back to Excel.
Licences and capacity set against actual use.
200+ users, dozens of workspaces, and nobody who can say who owns which report or who can see which data.
Thousands of reports, dozens of them called 'Weekly Sales' and some ending in 'old' or 'final', and no one knows which still matter.
Licences assigned once and never checked against use.
The same KPI shows different numbers in different reports. When business users cannot trust what they see, they stop using it.
Every report with its users and how often they open it.
Archive what nobody opens
The most frequent users of each report.
Ask them to own it or name who should
Licence holders next to their actual use, and active users without a licence.
Remove idle licences, assign the missing ones
Your most advanced and active users.
Target training and new data initiatives at them
Tenant settings, access controls and row-level security in one place, and the reports that live in personal workspaces.
Move the most used business-built reports to a central workspace
Reports, tables, sources and refreshes with their use and performance.
Showback or chargeback, and usage facts to set priorities with the business
At the retailer, answering these questions by hand would have taken hundreds of hours. Power BI Monitoring reads the answers from the Power BI REST API, which holds only the last 30 days of activity, and keeps the history from the day it is set up. It can be set up within a day.
The quick wins won the BI director the executive committee's trust and the budget for the next phases. Licences held by inactive users were removed (653 Pro and 41 Premium Per User) and 78 active users got one. For the 300 most used reports, one of the five most frequent users took ownership or named the right person in 93% of cases. Read the case study →
Procurement got one set of numbers, current within the same negotiation cycle. Before, buyers had gone back to Excel and direct SAP queries because the same KPI showed different values, and steel price reports ran one to two months behind. A 30-day audit found the root causes before the rebuild. Read the case study →
"The Astral Forest consulting team successfully migrated part of the BI environment to Azure and, through 'quick win' Analysis Services optimisations, secured the continuity of the service." Dariusz Gregorczyk, Head of BI & Data Solutions, Empik
Power BI on SQL Server, Analysis Services, Azure Synapse and Databricks.
MicroStrategy to Power BI with an agent pipeline. MicroStrategy migration →
When the problem sits under Power BI, we rebuild the data platform as well.
Architecture, governance, adoption and cost. You get the findings, a roadmap that says what to fix first, and a licence view, at a fixed price.
The Power BI REST API keeps 30 days of activity, so Monitoring starts with those and keeps the history from then on. At the retail company we collected 120 days before deciding what to archive.
From matching licences to use: idle licences are removed, and active users who lack one get one. At the retail company that meant removing 653 Pro and 41 Premium Per User licences and assigning 78, which saved €65.6k a year.
They move to an archive after an agreed period without use, so a seasonal report, such as one opened only for the holiday season, can be brought back when someone asks. At the retail company, archiving also removed the datasets that queried the warehouse and cut 364 minutes of query time a day. The reports that stay get a business owner, found among their most frequent users.
With an audit of the infrastructure, the data model and the way decisions use the reports. At the telecom procurement team a data engineer and a Power BI developer ran it in 30 days and found the root causes before anything was rebuilt, among them 699 unused columns out of 1,100 in the data models.
Your user count, workspaces and licence mix are enough to start. We tell you what the assessment would look at in your tenant and what it would cost. You speak with Michał Dębski, co-founder and solution architect, who led the Power BI assessment at the retail company.
