Tableau v/s Power BI Administration Capabilities

In this article , I'm going to share my experience of working as a Tableau & Power BI Administrator and comparing some of the capabilities / features available to admins like myself in order to administer , monitor and apply governance while managing the implementation.

Generally any Tableau / PBI admin's daily activities involve finding answer to these questions and many more like this.

• Who are the most active users on server ??
• Which Reports/Workspaces/Datasets are mostly used??
• How are dataset refresh happening ??
• How many distinct users as per the time frame selected ?
• Refresh errors and schedules
• Stale content management
• Resource utilisation metrics
• User and content management

Now let's look at the capabilities provided by Power BI in order to do these admin activities.

• In PBI , either you can go to Usage Metrics under Admin portal which is a very basic feature and it is not interactive and there aren’t any filters available if I want to check for something in a specific time range. In the analytics community Power BI is projected as a visualisation tool while the admin like me feels limited with static image like this certainly tells me that nobody from the PBI product team has actually thought about admin capabilities and solely focused only on the enhancing developer side of the PBI.
• Another way to do some basic admin tasks and track usage is via Premium Capacity utilization and metrics app which is not easy to setup and not fully functional as on today's date ( 22 Sept 2021). It provides only basic insights with least interactivity. You can find many other limitations with this app at this link.
• Another way to see some report usage metrics is via the report usage metrics report which can be generated inside each workspace.

1. Not much interactive
2. Very basic information about usage
3. Biggest limitation is that it can only be generated at an individual workspace level.
4. Being an administrator, I would like to manage and see things at capacity level and then drill down to report / workspace level.

• Final approach is to explore log analytics and rest API's.

1. They are equivalent to going to the physical branch of your bank in order to do the smallest of the banking activities.
2. Today’s generation is looking for smart mobile apps to do all of their banking ops.
3. When we are presenting Power BI as an interactive visualization tool , why are we forcing the admin to go to service api’s to do their basic daily activities ?
4. Which is more error prone : Writing an API code v/s Exploring the metadata via interactive tool
5. Not every admin comes with an Azure background and not every PBI implementation in this world has an Azure ecosystem running behind the scenes so that they can plug into different Azure components.
6. Not every time an admin can go down into deep thinking mode in order to write a script to do even the simplest of the job and on top of this the api rate throttling problem makes it worse.
7. Managing the response from the API is another big problem. Then PBI Admin need to wear a data engineer hat in order to process the result set coming into json format

Now lets look at some of the administration capabilities provided by Tableau Server.

This dashboard "Traffic to views" help me figure out a lot of insights about the content hosted on server. These are the quick insights I get from this dashboard.

1. Most popular dashboard in a certain timeframe.
2. Top users for any dashboard who are using it / consuming it.
3. Among the dashboard which views are most popular so that the dashboard developer can take a call whether to keep the least viewed or unused views inside the dashboard.
4. All these insights are very helpful in my daily activities as sometimes they help in prioritizing issues / importance. In case of any issue , I would first try to sort out issues with a more popular dashboard rather than a dashboard which has not got any views in the last X days / weeks.

• Tableau provides this pre-built dashboard “Actions by All Users” which gives me insight into how my Tableau Server is being used. I can filter the view by actions and by time range. All of these interactive dashboards help me to start my analysis at a higher level and help me to decide the direction for deeper analysis.

• Tableau also provides a similar pre-built view to track down individual user actions.It comes handy when doing quick user audits. It can also help to determine if any particular user is heavily using any specific dashboard.I can track down if any particular user has stopped publishing any dashboard recently. Any server administration and governance related stuff is very dynamic in nature so these kinds of interactive dashboards come very handy.

• PBI provides nothing more than a simple list of refresh jobs which have ran on server in past few days with zero interactivity and even the basic information like job duration is missing in this set of information. On the other hand Tableau has provided a super helpful dashboard which helps me tremendously in tracking my backgrounder jobs on server. It's one of the most frequently used admin view for any Tableau Server Admin.
• This view exactly gives me the much needed insights about any refresh job running on server and its very interactive. With just the mouse hover action it gives me a pop up containing information like when the refresh job started and when it got completed and if it fails , it also shows the error message.

• There is another pre-built dashboard which helps me to identify stale content on Tableau server with just a few clicks and a completely interactive dashboard.However Power BI does not provide any such dashboard to identify / list stale content.
• Tableau Server saves all its metadata inside its repository and is made available to the admin with complete transparency.? Tableau has published its complete meta data dictionary where I can go and learn about all the tables and fields inside them. It helps me to build my own customized admin dashboards as well.
• All the pre-built dashboards can also be downloaded and altered according to the org / project needs and can also be shared with developers and end users if needed.

There are many other small but important features which are missing as of now on Power BI side which if available can make life easier for admins like me who have to switch to Power BI Administration as well.

Conclusion :- As of now Power BI does not provide much capabilities to admins in order to have a better governance and monitoring mechanism in place. There is a lot of scope to expand the capabilities of Power BI Admin in order to match the capabilities available in Tableau which comes with much more matured and insightful pre-built dashboards thus making the life easier for its administrator.