Usage metrics do not cover your embedded reports
You embed Power BI in a product your customers use, or you publish reports to the web for a wider audience. The analytics are part of the value you sell, so how people use them matters as much as any other feature in your app.
Everywhere else in your product you have real analytics. You know which screens people visit, where they stall, what they click. Inside the embedded report, you have nothing.
Why this is hard today
This is not a gap in your setup. Power BI's own usage metrics do not capture embedded reports or the publish-to-web flow at all. Microsoft's documentation says so directly and recommends tracking usage in the hosting app instead.
The usual workarounds each stop short. Activity logs give you tenant-level audit events, not page or visual level behaviour. The embedding SDK exposes page-level events, but wiring it up, storing the stream, and modelling it is a project of its own, and it still does not tell you which slicer a customer clicked or what they filtered to.
Source: Microsoft: usage metrics do not support embedded or publish-to-web
What BI Pixie shows you
BI Pixie tracks from inside the report itself, so the same tracking works wherever the report is rendered: embedded in your app, published to web, in the Power BI service, in Desktop, on mobile, and in Report Server.
- Clicks at the visual level
- Which visuals your customers click, mapped to their real position on the page, so you can see what draws attention and what nobody touches.
- What they filter and select
- Slicer clicks, filter changes, and the values selected, so you learn the questions your customers are actually asking.
- Where they go deeper
- Drill-through actions, bookmark navigation, and tooltip views show which paths through the report carry real intent.
- Depth of engagement per customer
- Session duration and interactions per session tell you whether the analytics in your product are being used or merely loaded.
What it takes to set up
- 1 Connect the workspace holding the reports you embed.
- 2 Add Pixies to those reports. Your embedding code does not change.
- 3 Publish as you normally would and let customers use the app.
- 4 Review engagement per report, page, and visual in the BI Pixie Dashboard.
Worth knowing: Tracking travels with the report, so no change is needed in your application. If you want to tell customers apart in the data rather than see one anonymous population, enable user identity capture in tracking setup. It is off by default and no personally identifiable information is collected unless you turn it on.