Explicit Measures Podcast 479: Mailbag! Tracking App Usage at Scale
Nov 25, 2025
Mike and Tommy delve into the intricacies of tracking app usage across 70 school districts and 9,000 users. They highlight the challenges of native analytics and explore practical workarounds using the scanner API. The duo dissects the Fabric capacity metrics app, discussing its benefits for troubleshooting. They debate the importance of baseline metrics for different users and emphasize the need for admin access to retrieve detailed data. Practical steps, like exporting logs for reporting, round out their recommendations.
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Start With Scanner API And Workspace Monitoring
- Use the Scanner API and workspace monitoring as the primary data sources to capture app and audience metadata.
- Combine those sources into a centralized model to link apps, audiences, and events for reporting.
Enable Workspace Monitoring Carefully
- Turn on workspace monitoring to stream detailed events and query-level stats for each workspace.
- Beware: it's very chatty and can generate large volumes of data for busy workspaces.
Capacity App Is Useful But Time-Limited
- Fabric Capacity Metrics provides operation-level telemetry and a Kusto backend you can consume.
- Its built-in window is short, so export or persist data if you need longer trends.