Find Duplicate and Stale BI Reports
Most BI estates accumulate near-duplicate and abandoned reports for years. This recipe tunes a Catalog Context Search agent to find duplication and staleness across Tableau and Power BI metadata, so you can consolidate. One enterprise used it to cut its Tableau license count in half, with a target of cutting it by 80%.
One to two metered actions. This is a periodic cleanup, not a per-user workload, so total spend stays small. At 0.25 ACU per metered action; confirm actual spend on the Usage page.
What you’ll use
Section titled “What you’ll use”Build it
Section titled “Build it”-
Confirm BI metadata coverage
Make sure your Tableau and Power BI sources are cataloged with usage metadata, owners, and last-modified dates populated. The agent can only reason over what’s indexed.
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Clone and tune the agent
Clone Catalog Context Search and rewrite the prompt for rationalization questions: “find reports with overlapping titles, data sources, and fields”, “list reports not modified in 12 months, grouped by owner.”
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Work domain by domain
Run the agent per business domain and have report owners confirm candidates before retiring anything.
Gotchas
Section titled “Gotchas”Scope expectations around what BI search can filter on today:
- The BI Report Search tool can’t filter on custom fields, stewardship, or calculated-field expressions.
- BI owner properties aren’t indexed as a search facet, and neither is the source connection string.
Where these matter, export candidates and finish the slicing in a spreadsheet or query.
Variations
Section titled “Variations”- A “BI knowledge search” agent for one department (such as Finance), published into Microsoft Copilot or Teams.