Running Power BI best practices for reports in all workspaces

There's a few important aspects that need to be taken into account when building Power BI reports. The report should be easy to read, have good performance and provide insights that are relevant to its users. Making a report that way can be hard, especially if you don't have a lot of experience, that is why we should follow best practices.

What if there already are a lot of reports in your tenant and you are not sure which ones are built well? Rebuilding all reports is usually not an option, so we need a best practices analyzer to tell us which ones are the most troublesome.

In this blog post, we will show you how to:

-Find the worst reports in your tenant

-Understand what the main issues with them are

-See which visuals or pages are potentially causing problems

To do this, we will use one of Measure Killer's modes called Tenant Analysis. The same process can be done in Limited Tenant Analysis, if you don't have tenant-admin (Fabric Administrator or Power Platform Administrator) rights.

Requirements:

-Version 2.6 or later is required of Measure Killer

-Make sure you have a paid license or request a free trial here

-If you run "Limited Tenant Analysis" you need to have at least contributor rights in all workspaces you want to analyze

Firstly, open Measure Killer's settings so we can decide which report best practices rules to apply and change the values according to our needs:

Opening report best practices settings in Measure Killer.

Report best practices settings and customizations.

Here, we can unselect rules that don't apply to our specific case or change the default values to fit our needs. After that, remember to save.

Now let us open Tenant Analysis.

Tenant Analysis mode selection in Measure Killer's main window.

In the filter window, we can remove all tabs except the Power BI reports one, since that is the only one we need for this use case:

Tenant Analysis filter selection. We only select the Power BI reports tab

The next step is to pick which reports we want to analyze. For this post, I will run the analysis for all reports by filtering the selection table:

Filtering Tenant Analysis selection table to select all reports. 1- Change the filter to "Type"; 2- Type "report" in the filter; 3- Enable search all levels; 4- Select all reports.

Click on "Run" (see screenshot below) to start the analysis. This may take a while if you have a lot of reports.

Since we are running this as an admin Measure Killer can grant permissions to workspaces we do not have access to. There is a limit of 200 workspaces per hour. It will ask you to remove the permissions once it finished running.

Hint: Analyzing reports via Measure Killer does not consume any CUs from your Power BI or Fabric capacity.

Click on Run to start the analysis.

After Measure Killer is done, switch to the "Power BI reports" tab. Here, we can see the best practices scores for all reports and we can sort them accordingly.

"Power BI reports" tab in Tenant Analysis, sorted by the "Best practices score" column.

By right clicking on one report, you can find detailed info on the best practices rules violated, the severity of each rule and the pages or visuals involved.

Report best practices context menu option.

Report best practices details for the Sales Report. Here, you can find detailed info on the best practices rules violated, the severity of each rule and the pages/visuals involved.

By clicking the export button, we get an Excel file to further explore the data and make the necessary changes to the reports.

Report best practices Excel export, analyzed in Power Query.