How to Manage and Audit Power BI Report Subscriptions

The operations team uses a weekly summary to decide where to spend its time. It normally arrives before the Monday meeting. Now the person who set it up has left, and the new manager is trying to answer three ordinary questions: who maintains it, are the right people receiving it, and did the latest copy arrive?

Start with that report rather than an abstract audit checklist. Find the existing subscription, confirm why the team needs it and identify the person who will look after it. Then check its settings and a recent delivery. An enabled schedule describes an instruction; it does not prove that the instruction succeeded.

Make the routine easier to manage

For jobs run in PBRS, the team can maintain report selection, timing, output and destinations together. Schedule history helps investigate a particular run, error details help identify what went wrong, and the separately configured Audit Trail records supported user actions.

That is especially useful when the “Monday report” has grown into several files for different teams. PBRS can prepare supported Excel or PDF outputs, combine related reports, apply supported protection and distribute the appropriate version to each audience. The person taking over has a defined reporting job to maintain rather than a set of manual export instructions.

PBRS handles reports from Power BI Service, Power BI Report Server and SSRS. Its history covers jobs it runs; it does not become the history of native Power BI subscriptions running elsewhere. Keep both sources clearly identified in the review.

The goal is practical: the new owner should know what the team expects, where to change it and where to look when something does not arrive.

Create one short handover record for the Weekly Operations Summary. Include the report, subscription or PBRS schedule identity, business owner, backup contact, intended recipients, delivery time and time zone, output format and any end date. Keep stable identifiers beside names so a renamed report remains traceable.

Then attach evidence according to the question it answers. This prevents an innocent-looking “last modified” date from turning into an invented “last delivered” date.

Be clear about the review’s reach

A creator’s subscription list and a workspace administrator’s view cover different sets of records. Neither should be labeled a complete tenant audit without checking the wider scope. Include the workspaces, reporting systems and review period in your record.

For a broader native inventory, use the approach in listing subscriptions with the Admin API. Keep failed requests visible. “Could not collect this report’s subscriptions” is different from “the request succeeded and returned none.”

Keep uncertainties useful

Suppose the settings are correct and a recent modification is recorded, but nobody has confirmed Monday’s email. Record delivery as unconfirmed and assign a follow-up. The audit is more helpful when it tells the next person what to investigate than when every row looks complete.

Retain only the evidence the review needs, in a location the responsible team can access. Record time zones and collection dates, and preserve important logs before their retention period expires.

Return to the operations summary and repair the existing arrangement before creating another recurring job. A second subscription can make the immediate problem look solved while leaving two Monday emails running indefinitely.

Review the native Power BI subscription

Open the report’s subscription pane and use Manage all for the relevant list. Workspace administrators can review and, where supported, edit or take over another owner’s subscription. App and My workspace subscriptions have creator-management restrictions, so confirm which route applies.

Check the recipient list, report page, saved view, time zone, output and expiry. After an ownership change, inspect the content again to confirm that it remains appropriate for its recipients. Use Run now for a controlled test, remembering that it does not refresh the underlying semantic model.

Microsoft’s subscription management guide explains the available controls. Confirm both the updated settings and the received result before closing the handover.

Give PBRS jobs a useful action history

PBRS’s Audit Trail is optional and needs to be configured. In Options > Audit Trail, enable it, supply the connection details for an external ODBC-compliant database, connect and apply the settings. The audit information is stored in that designated database, not internally in PBRS.

Test a controlled action and confirm its record appears. The trail records supported actions such as executing, refreshing and editing schedules, including activity from the PBRS Web Application. Assign responsibility for the database’s access, backups and retention. The Audit Trail setup guide gives the configuration steps.

Investigate the run that mattered

For the Monday PBRS job, open System Monitor > History View and inspect the relevant run. Expand a Partial Success result to locate the failed report or destination. If one file reached a shared folder but the email failed, the successful folder delivery does not close the email investigation.

Match the history with the applicable mail evidence. PBRS’s Email Log covers SMTP sending; for Exchange or Office 365, check the sending account’s Sent Items. Submission to a mail system is not the same as confirmed receipt in the intended mailbox.

Before retrying an uncertain send, check whether the first copy already arrived. Keep the original result, correction and replacement delivery together so the next owner can understand what happened.

Improve the job when its requirements have changed

If the team now needs a formatted workbook, separate regional files or a combined PDF, define that requirement in PBRS and test the finished output. Keep a native subscription that already does the job. If PBRS replaces it, agree on the cutover and stop the old recurring delivery at the appropriate point to avoid duplicates.

A reporting portal can make the new owner’s job easier by showing the outcome of a PBRS execution. Keep the schedule identity, reporting period and returned execution reference together so the portal can explain a particular run.

For an asynchronous execution, use the returned ExecutionId to read its status. The example below checks an existing run; it does not trigger another delivery.

GET {pbrsBaseUrl}/api/Schedule/GetExecutionStatus?ExecutionId={ExecutionId}
Authorization: bearer {pbrsAccessToken}
Accept: application/json

For the operations manager, translate the evidence into a useful status such as “still running,” “needs investigation” or “delivery confirmed,” using a clear definition for each. Avoid showing “delivered” merely because an HTTP request succeeded.

This execution record is separate from the Audit Trail. One helps explain a run; the other records supported user actions when configured. Together with the actual output, they give the next owner a much stronger account of Monday’s reporting.

By next Monday, the operations manager should know who maintains the report and where to turn if it is late. The new owner should be able to find the job, inspect its recent result and explain any open issue without reconstructing someone else’s habits.

Start with one important delivery, then repeat the review across the agreed scope. Keep the owner and backup current, revisit recipients when roles change, and review the output when the business need changes.

Explore the PBRS Excel scheduling guide for recurring workbook delivery, or Power BI Report Automation for the wider workflow. Use the evaluation guide below to test a real job and the evidence your team needs to support it.

Download the PBRS Internal Evaluation Guide