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Category: Power BI

Streaming Performance Counters Into Power BI

Published 2017-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Koester shows how to load Performance Counters (i.e., what Perfmon displays) into Power BI in near real time:

In the previous post I showed how you can Push Data into Power BI Streaming Datasets with C#. That example used dummy data. In this post I’ll show how to push performance counter data into a Power BI Streaming Dataset as a real world example. This scenario allows for monitoring a computer or application in near real time in the browser.

I won’t go through the steps of creating a Power BI Streaming Dataset. You can reference my previous post if you need instructions. I will note that the value names that you choose in the Streaming Dataset must match the C# property names for the script to work. This is noted in the code comments as well.

Check it out.

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Associative Purchasing Behavior With DAX

Published 2017-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington solves a particular associative purchasing behavior problem:

The requirement is to be able to select a single customer from a list of customers and see what products they have purchased.  Then the next things is to be able to compare sales of this same group of products across all customers while ignoring sales of all other products.  Stated another way, the report should show sales from all customers but only for the products purchased by the original selected customer.  Now there is a “cheats” solution to this problem using visual level filters – more on that later.  The purpose of this article is to show a DAX only solution.

Read Matt’s answer, but also check out the comments for an even better solution if you’re using a proper star schema.

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Power BI Usage Metrics

Published 2017-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gogula Aryalingam shows how to access Power BI usage metrics for a report or dashboard:

Each app workspace gets its own report usage metrics data set, it’s just that you don’t see it when you are in the portal. In order to access it (at least for now) you need to use Power BI Desktop. When you open Power BI Desktop, you need to sign-in with the appropriate login, and then choose Power BI service from Get Data menu item. You then get listed with a set of app workspaces; within each you would find a list of all the datasets that were every published to each of the workspaces. Additionally, Power BI will also give you two more datasets: Report Usage Metrics Model and Dashboard Usage Metrics Model. However, these data models will only show up if you had attempted to view usage metrics at least once on one of the reports of the app workspace.

Read the whole thing.

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When The Power BI Work Is Done

Published 2017-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has a great checklist to help you figure out if your Power BI dashboard is done:

Auto time intelligence is enabled by default, and it applies to each individual PBIX file (there’s not a global option). For most datetime columns that exist in the dataset, a hidden date table is created in the model to support time-oriented DAX calculations. This is great functionality for newer users, or if you have a very simple data model. However, if you typically utilize a standard Date table, then you will want to disable the hidden date tables to reduce the file size. (Tip: You can view the hidden date tables if you connect to the PBIX via DAX Studio.)

There are a lot of good things to think about here.

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Using The Squint Test

Published 2017-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria gives us the squint test:

While you can definitely perform the Squint Test on your report within Power BI Desktop, I recommend also testing in a browser once the report is deployed to PowerBI.com or to the Power BI Report Server portal since colors and objects may be slightly different there.

The Squint Test is also used in web page design, so web developers have made tools to aid them in this check. While just squinting at the page is perfectly sufficient, using a browser extension or another tool allows you to easily share your findings with others. In the Chrome Browser, there is a free extension called The Squint Test. This extension places an eye icon near the top right of the browser window. Clicking the icon provides a slider that allows you to increase or decrease the amount of blur applied to the page.

Meagan also has an example of applying this test and picks a dashboard where she can make some improvements, so check it out.

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Running R Scripts In Power BI

Published 2017-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Vaillancourt shows how to run an R script inside Power BI Desktop:

All of the options I will show require you to have R installed on your machine. I am using R version 3.4.3 I got here as well as R Studio (an IDE: Integrated Scripting Environment) version 1.1.383 I obtained here. You can also use Microsoft R Open, which you can get here. All are free. I am choosing base R and R Studio because I want to play with/show the use of non-Microsoft tools in conjunction with Microsoft tools. I am using 2.53.4954.481 64-bit (December 2017) of Power BI Desktop. Note that things could look/behave differently in other version of Power BI Desktop.

For this post, I am using a well-known dataset known as the Iris dataset, which you can read about here. I downloaded the zip file from here to obtain a csv file of the data set for one of my examples. The Iris dataset is also included in the “datasets” package in R Studio, which I will use as well.

Note: A key R concept to understand is that of a data frame, which is essentially just data in a tabular format. In a data frame, the “columns” are actually called “variables.”

Once you have R and an R IDE installed, Power BI Desktop will detect them. You can see this in the Power BI Desktop Options.

Mark shows you step by step using some snazzy SnagIt imagery.

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Power BI Dashboard Sharing

Published 2017-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad covers one method of sharing Power BI content with users:

What dashboard sharing as the name of it explains is based on a dashboard. You can only share a dashboard with this method, not a report. Consider that you have a dashboard like below screenshot, and you want to share it. There is a share link at the top right corner of the dashboard.

Dashboard sharing have very few options to set and is very simple to configure. You just need to add the email address of people whom you want to share this report. You can also write a message for them to know that this report is shared with them.

Click through for more information.  Note that this is a paid feature.

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Selecting Specific Characters In M

Published 2017-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb points out a new function in Power BI:

It’s very easy to use: the first parameter takes a text value, the second parameter takes either a text value containing a single text value or a list of single characters, and it returns the text from the first parameter minus all characters that are not in the second parameter. For example, the expression:

Text.Select("Hello", "l")

…returns the text value “ll”

Click through to see an example of how you can use this to filter out punctuation and other unwanted characters.

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The Power BI Gateway

Published 2017-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains how the Power BI gateway works:

You don’t need a gateway in all scenarios. Only if the data source is located on-premises, you need a gateway. For online or cloud-based data sources, no gateway is required. For example; if you are getting data from CRM Online, you don’t need a gateway. However, if you are getting data from SQL Server database located on your local domain server, then you need a gateway. For Azure SQL DB you don’t need a gateway. However, a SQL Server database located on Azure Virtual Machine is considered as on-premises and needs gateway.

This post could not have come at a better time for me, so I’m definitely happy to see it.

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