Measure Killer Measure Killer

Report subscriptions

See every Power BI and paginated-report subscription across your tenant — owner, recipients (including external / unresolved users), frequency and format. Catch subscriptions that deliver reports outside the access boundary or quietly burn capacity.

Last updated · May 29, 2026

What you get

Measure Killer Report subscriptions window — a subscription expanded to show its owner and each individual recipient, with frequency, format and active dates per subscription

Every report subscription across the whole tenant, in one tree — for both Power BI reports and paginated reports. Each top-level row is a subscription; expand it to see its Owner and every recipient under Users — resolved users, groups, or UnResolved entries (external, guest, or free accounts the service couldn’t resolve to a tenant identity).

Every subscription carries:

  • Name and # of users / groups it goes out to
  • Type — the subscription type
  • Workspace, Report, and Page it renders — the Report is either a Power BI report or a paginated report
  • Enabled — whether the subscription is currently active
  • Content link / Preview image — what the email includes
  • Attachment format — PDF or PNG
  • Frequency — Daily, Weekly, and so on
  • Start date / End date (UTC) — the subscription’s active window

This is information the Power BI Service does not surface anywhere in one place — there is no tenant-wide “who is subscribed to what” view in the portal. Measure Killer builds it from the admin API.

Why subscriptions matter — two risks worth auditing

1. They can deliver reports outside the access boundary

A subscription pushes a rendered copy of the report (a PDF/PNG attachment, or a link) to everyone on its recipient list — on a schedule, completely outside the permission model. Those recipients do not need access to the report itself. So a subscription can route sensitive content to people who could never open the report directly — including external recipients, or addresses the service can’t resolve to a tenant identity (flagged as UnResolved).

A normal access audit won’t catch this, because the delivery happens through the subscription engine, not through report permissions. Cross-reference subscription recipients against Access & permissions to find reports leaving the boundary you think you’ve drawn.

2. They consume capacity on every send

Every subscription triggers a scheduled render of the report on your capacity. One or two are nothing — but hundreds of daily subscriptions across the tenant become a large, easily-overlooked driver of Capacity Unit consumption and of peak load at the times they all fire.

If Capacity metrics shows background or scheduled consumption on a report that nobody seems to be opening interactively, report subscriptions are a prime suspect — sort this window by Frequency to find the Daily senders driving the cost.

Run the analysis

  1. Enable it up front (admin only). In the Pre-filters window before the scan, turn on fetching report subscriptions. This option is only available in admin mode — see Run a tenant-wide scan.
  2. Scan and complete Phase 2 — select the reports and click Analyze.
  3. On the Power BI reports tab, click Subscriptions to open the Report subscriptions window.
  4. Use Search with Search all levels to find a recipient anywhere in the tree, Expand / Collapse to open the whole tree, Filters to narrow it, and click any column header to sort.

Common workflows

  • Find content leaving the access boundary. Expand subscriptions and look for UnResolved recipients or external domains — these are reports being mailed to people outside your tenant’s access model.
  • Find the capacity hogs. Sort by Frequency to surface the Daily subscriptions, then tie the matching reports back to Capacity metrics to quantify the CU cost.
  • Clean up stale subscriptions. Filter for subscriptions whose End date has passed or that are no longer Enabled — they still clutter the inventory and, if re-enabled, resume consuming capacity.
  • Review high-fan-out subscriptions. Sort by # of users / groups to find subscriptions blasting a report to large recipient lists.

Export the data

The toolbar offers Export Excel and Export JSON (paid editions only — disabled during the trial). Report subscriptions are also part of the full JSON export bundle — see the Exports overview.