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Finding Events Linked To A Specific Power BI Visual In Fabric Workspace Monitoring

Over the last few years one topic I have blogged about several times is how to link the detailed data about DAX query execution that can be found in Log Analytics – and now Workspace Monitoring – to the visual in a Power BI report that generated those DAX queries, something that is extremely useful when you’re performance tuning Power BI reports. My first post here from 2021 showed how write the KQL for Log Analytics but the problem has always been how to get the IDs of the visuals in a Power BI report. You can get the IDs from the definition of the Power BI report, as shown here, and Sandeep Pawar has a great post on some other methods here, but all these methods were superseded in the March release of Power BI with the ability to copy the IDs by right clicking on the visual in a Power BI report when editing it (thank you Rui Romano!).

This made me realise that it’s time to revisit my first post on how to get the query details in KQL since the column names in Workspace Monitoring are slightly different from Log Analytics and, indeed, the KQL needed can be simplified from my original version. Here’s a KQL query that you can run in a KQL Queryset connected to your Monitoring Eventhouse:

let VisualId = "InsertVisualIdHere";
SemanticModelLogs
| search VisualId
| project Timestamp, OperationName, OperationDetailName, DurationMs, EventText, OperationId 
| order by Timestamp asc

Once you’ve copied the visual’s ID from the report (remember you need to specifically enable this feature and that you need to be in Edit mode) by right-clicking on it and selecting “Copy object name”:

…then you just need to paste the ID into the let statement in the first line of the KQL query and run it:

You can find the documentation for the columns in the SemanticModelLogs table here and the documentation for the events here. The events for a specific query all have the same value in the OperationId column.

Bonus fact: you can now run queries against Workspace Monitoring using Semantic Link Labs, as documented here, which makes it much easier to do other fun stuff with this data. For example, I can imagine there are ways to visualise DAX query and semantic model refresh events in Python that would make them much easier to analyse, but that’s something for a future blog post.