Measure Killer Measure Killer

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Consumption & usage — track what's actually used

Find out which Power BI reports, pages, apps, and Excel connections are actively used — and which have zero consumption. Build a usage history beyond the 28-day limit.

What Measure Killer covers

Measure Killer tracks consumption across four dimensions — each one answering a different “is anyone using this?” question.

Report views & opens — down to the page level

The core consumption metric. For every report and every individual page (tab) inside it:

  • Report opens — how many times the report was opened
  • Page views — how many times each page was viewed
  • Accumulated beyond the 28-day limit via a local SQLite database

This is the data that tells you page 1 gets 400 views while page 5 gets zero — so you can retire dead pages, justify report cleanup, and prioritize which reports matter most.

Report views & opens

App consumption — which apps are adopted?

The Apps tab shows 28-day consumption data (opens) for every Power BI app in the tenant. Sort by opens to find apps with zero or near-zero usage — especially those publishing from Premium capacity that costs money.

Apps & audiences

Excel & external connections — who’s querying your models?

The activity-log scan identifies every user who connects to your semantic models through Excel (Analyze in Excel, pivot tables) or through external XMLA applications (DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, custom apps).

This is the data that’s invisible in Power BI’s built-in reporting — Excel users consume columns and measures that don’t show up in any Power BI report. Without this, cleanup could break someone’s pivot table.

Identify Excel users

Capacity metrics — what’s driving your Fabric bill?

CU consumption per item, per-item cost breakdown, and historical capacity usage across your Fabric / Premium capacities. Identifies the items that drive the most capacity cost — so you can optimize the expensive ones first.

Capacity metrics accumulate in the same local SQLite database as report views, so your cost history grows beyond the 14-day window Microsoft retains.

Capacity metrics

Building long-term usage history

Power BI only retains the last 28 days of consumption data. Measure Killer stores every scan’s results in a local SQLite database and merges fresh data on each run — so your history accumulates automatically. Run a scan weekly or monthly and you build months or years of usage data that Microsoft no longer retains.

For unattended collection, MK Automation runs the same logic on a schedule inside your Fabric tenant. Results land in Fabric tables or your data warehouse — ready for Databricks, Snowflake, or a Power BI report.

Common consumption workflows

  • Find unused reports. Sort reports by views (ascending) to find those with zero consumption. Cross-reference with the connected semantic model — if the model is also unused, both are candidates for cleanup.
  • Retire dead pages. Expand a report to see per-page view counts. Remove pages with zero views to simplify reports and reduce visual complexity.
  • Justify decommissioning. Export the accumulated consumption history to show stakeholders that a report has had zero opens for the last three months — evidence beyond the 28-day window.
  • Audit before model cleanup. Before removing columns from a semantic model, check the activity logs for Excel users. Columns that look unused in Power BI reports may still power someone’s pivot table.
  • Track adoption over time. Export consumption data quarterly. Measure content sprawl, track whether new reports are gaining adoption, and quantify the impact of governance initiatives.