Frequently asked questions

BI Pixie is a usage-tracking and AI Readiness platform for Power BI. It adds Pixies, invisible tracking pixels native to Power BI, to your reports, and through them it captures engagement: page views, visual clicks, filter selections, and feedback. BI Pixie collects no personal data by default. It also assesses the AI Readiness of your semantic models, measuring how reliably Copilot in Power BI and Fabric data agents can answer from them. See the Product page for the full capability list.

Native usage metrics show page-level views and a list of viewers. BI Pixie tracks visual-level clicks, filter and slicer selections, bookmark navigation, drill-through, and user feedback, and it covers embedded and publish-to-web reports, which native usage metrics do not cover at all. See what usage metrics leave out.

AI Readiness is a score from 0 to 100 for how well a semantic model is prepared for Copilot in Power BI and Fabric data agents. BI Pixie computes the score and drafts the fixes that raise it. You review every change and choose what gets written. AI Readiness is available in BI Pixie Cloud and the Fabric Workload. See the AI Readiness guide.

Most teams start with BI Pixie Cloud, which is fully managed and live in minutes. If you already work inside Microsoft Fabric, the Fabric Workload gives you the same product natively in the Fabric portal. If you need full data sovereignty or already run in your own Azure or Power Platform environment, self-hosted keeps your telemetry in your tenant, with usage tracking only (no AI Readiness). See the full deployment comparison.

You connect an AI provider so that BI Pixie can write text for you and stand in for an AI under test: proposed descriptions, AI Instructions, display folder names, the business domains and natural phrasing behind benchmark questions, and the generic AI agent that a benchmark can test. Scoring never uses it, and neither does the dimension breakdown, the findings and the order they come in, usage grounding, assessment history, AI data schema curation, or field defaults. A benchmark can still be built and run with no provider connected, using fixed question templates instead of natural phrasing.

BI Pixie calls your provider when you ask it to draft something, or when a benchmark you have set up runs. Usage therefore follows the work you chose to do, such as the size of the work list you asked BI Pixie to draft, rather than how much your reports are used. BI Pixie sends the relevant semantic model metadata, meaning names, existing descriptions, AI Instructions, and usage signals, and never sends your data.

You can bring your own provider, in which case the usage lands on your own account under your own limits and controls: Azure AI Foundry runs in your own Azure tenant, and OpenAI and Anthropic each take an API key. Accounts with a designated Fabric workspace can instead use the BI Pixie data agent, which runs on your own Fabric capacity with no API key to manage. If you would like per-operation estimates for planning, ask us and we will share what we measure. See AI Provider for setup.

Only where you approve a specific change. Assessing is read-only: BI Pixie reads the definition through the Fabric API using your own identity, so it can never reach a semantic model you cannot, and it writes nothing. When you optimize, each description, instruction, or folder arrives as a draft you can edit or discard, and nothing reaches the semantic model until you apply it. Writes go through your own Fabric permissions, so you need Contributor access or higher on the workspace.

No. BI Pixie Cloud is a hosted service: you sign in, connect your Power BI workspaces, add Pixies to your reports, and install the BI Pixie Dashboard into a workspace of your own. A Power BI Pro workspace is enough, and it supports up to eight dashboard refreshes a day. A Fabric capacity matters in four places: running BI Pixie as a Fabric Workload, creating a Fabric data agent, benchmarking through Copilot in Power BI or through your own data agent, and moving the telemetry pipeline to a Spark ETL once your volumes outgrow an import refresh.

Not for assessing or optimizing. Both read the semantic model definition through the Fabric API with your own identity and run in BI Pixie’s service rather than on your capacity, so they work on Power BI Pro and Premium Per User workspaces. A benchmark depends on which AI you test: Copilot in Power BI and your own Fabric data agent both answer on your capacity and need one, while a generic AI agent answers through your AI provider and needs none. AI to Test carries the full table.

BI Pixie can run natively in Microsoft Fabric, either as the BI Pixie Workload added from the Workload Hub, or installed into a Fabric workspace from BI Pixie Cloud. Either way a Fabric notebook processes your engagement data on your own capacity and the dashboard reads the result through Direct Lake, so there is no import refresh to time out. That matters most for a large Power BI estate with heavy report usage, where the volume of engagement events outgrows an import refresh, and your telemetry stays in your own tenant governed by your own policies. If you do not use Fabric but already run something like Azure Databricks, the same ETL can run there instead: contact us and we will provide the scripts. See Dashboard refresh for how the two pipelines compare.

Two ways forward. Ask your Fabric administrator to add BI Pixie from the Fabric Workload Hub, which is a tenant-level action, after which anyone in the tenant can create a BI Pixie item from a workspace’s New menu. Or start in BI Pixie Cloud and install BI Pixie into a Fabric workspace you already have, from the Overview page. That path does not need the workload approved, and you can move to the workload later.

BI Pixie has three plans: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise, on top of the Free plan every account starts on. Plans differ in tracked items, benchmark runs, report viewers, and support. See Pricing for current details, or the Free Plan section at the top of this page for what is included free.

Yes. The Free plan is a plan in its own right, not a trial with a countdown. It gives you an AI Readiness assessment for up to 500 semantic models, one tracked report, one tracked semantic model, and one AI benchmark run on that tracked semantic model, with no credit card required. That is enough to assess your mission-critical semantic models, measure how one report is used, and prove the result on one semantic model before you decide anything. See the Free Plan section at the top of this page for the full list.

No. One BI Pixie subscription, through the Azure Marketplace or the BI Pixie portal, covers BI Pixie Cloud and the Fabric Workload. Self-hosted deployments are sold as part of the Enterprise plan.

Yes. Upgrades take effect immediately. Downgrades take effect at the end of your current billing cycle. See the Pricing FAQ for proration details.

It depends on your deployment. BI Pixie Cloud stores telemetry in BI Pixie's hosted infrastructure, with Bring Your Own Storage available. The Fabric Workload stores telemetry in BI Pixie's Azure by default, with an option to keep it in your own OneLake for data residency. Self-hosted keeps every event in your own Azure tenant or Power Platform environment. See each deployment's data residency docs for the details.

No. BI Pixie collects no personal data by default, and people are identified by a hash. Named identity is an explicit, opt-in setting in tracking setup, and you can turn it on if your organization chooses. While it is off, BI Pixie measures engagement counts rather than who generated them.

Not for BI Pixie Cloud or the Fabric Workload; both are fully hosted. For self-hosted, you deploy a small set of components into your own Azure tenant or Power Platform environment: a few Azure Functions, storage, and a small desktop tool that adds Pixies to your reports. See the docs for your deployment for setup steps.

This page covers general questions. For step-by-step setup, tracking configuration, and troubleshooting on your specific deployment, see the Cloud FAQ, the Fabric Workload FAQ, or the self-hosted guide.

Visit the Support page, or contact us directly. Pro and Enterprise plans include email support.