Extending Microsoft Power BI

Have you heard about Microsoft Power BI? It’s a cloud based suite of reporting tools to help you analyze and transform data across your entire organization and more.  In other words, it is a powerful, easy to use, Business Intelligence solution that can help you understand realities, identify patterns and predict future outcomes for your organization as a whole.  As more companies are making the shift to the cloud and acquiring more data than ever, they need easy reporting tools that can help to explore data across all of their applications and other web sources. I’ve previously given an overview of some key components of Power BI: Power BI vs Dynamics CRM and Visualizing your Company’s Performance with Power BI.  In this blog, I want to briefly touch upon just some of the resources currently available for extending Power BI outside of its standard functionality.

1.Integration with Azure Services

Microsoft Azure Services offers a pretty impressive suite of business analytic tools and cloud storage solutions.  Integrating those services with Power BI can allow your organization to create           some rather insightful [real-time] dashboards.  Below is a chart pulled from the following article which explains more:  https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-azure- and-power-bi/

Not familiar with Azure Services?  Below are some helpful links with more info:

Azure Stream Analytics: This can be used for analyzing high-volume data in real-time.  Some examples of ways you can use it: Clickstream analysis on your web pages; issuing customer critical alerts (e.g: customer experience is degraded, contract expiration’s, system performance alerts, etc.)

Microsoft Power BI Embedded: Allows developers to embed the interactive reports within existing applications that your organization is already using. Some of my colleagues have also been blogging about Azure Services which can be tied in with Power BI.  For example, check out this blog on Machine Learning.

2.Power BI REST API

This high performing API allows developers that are creating custom apps to push data directly into your Power BI dashboards.  It also allows developers to read data from your Power BI dashboards for use within one of your existing applications. One use for this could be: Analyzing user input from custom portals you host. Pushing data directly to Power BI eliminates the need to create forms/fields to store the info in a middleware app

Beringer Associates is always here to provide expert knowledge in topics like these. Please contact us with any questions you may have.