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Category: Power BI

Viewing Power BI Audit Logs

Published 2016-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant shows how to give a Power BI Administrator rights to view the audit logs:

The Audit Logs are the third menu item in the Power BI Admin Portal. As you can tell by looking at a copy of the screen below, Audit Logs are not really part of Power BI. Yes the ability to log all of the content in Power BI exists in the Audit Logs, but so does the ability to review the audit logs for things like Exchange Mailbox Activities and User Administration Activities.

If the Office 365 Administrator has granted a user Power BI Administration rights, this is what the newly minted Power BI Administrator will see when trying to access any search activities. It appears that you the user has rights, until that user tries to do anything on the screen. At that point, this error window appears.

Click through to see how to grant audit log access.

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Timeline Visual

Published 2016-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight looks at a new Power BI custom visual:

  • The Timeline is similar to the native slicer in Power BI but has several more customizations available.

  • Not surprising, this visual can only accept date values.

  • If you need to adjust the start date of the Timeline based on your works Fiscal Calendar that is possible in the format settings.

This is a pretty nice visual, but when I tried to use it, I remember it feeling a little limiting, particularly around drilling into date slices.

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R Visuals In Power BI

Published 2016-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant discusses how to display R visuals in Power BI:

I hope that some day that this list becomes much longer, but it is a good start. If your company has lots R visuals and you wish to migrate them to Power BI, chances are some of the libraries you are using are not here. If you are interested in having your library added to the list of 352, go to the Ideas page of Power BI and request that your library be added, as Microsoft I know looks at this page to determine what to release in the future. Someone has requested that igraph be added, and since it hasn’t received a lot of votes yet (hint) it is probably low on the priority list.

Even so, this list does cover a lot of the most commonly used packages.

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Power BI Admin Portal

Published 2016-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates looks at the Power BI tenant settings in the admin portal:

Keep in mind that these selections apply to all users across the entire tenant. At this time we can’t control them by groups or anything of that nature.

In addition to the above settings for controlling user experience, the Admin Portal is also the place for viewing usage metrics which are helpful for determining who runs what how often (it’s not everything we could possibly want to know, but it’s a good start). The other two options, manage users and audit logs, redirect you over to the Office 365 Admin Center.

Another week, another few dozen Power BI additions…

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Query Folding In Power Query

Published 2016-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad discusses the performance implications of query folding in M:

I can’t start talking about the issue without explaining what Query Folding is, so let’s start with that. Query Folding means translating Power Query (M) transformations into native query language of the data source (for example T-SQL). In other words; when you run Power Query script on top of a SQL Server database, query folding will translate the M script into T-SQL statements, and fetch the final results.

Click through for more details.  The advice here sounds pretty similar to what we get for optimizing Integration Services:  push as much of the heavy lifting onto well-optimized source queries as possible, particularly when it comes to filtering out rows.

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Flow From Power BI

Published 2016-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb uses Microsoft Flow’s REST API to pass messages via Power BI:

So basically, in this case I’ve used Flow to create a web service without writing a single line of code. I can see a lot of potential uses for this and I suspect I’ll be blogging about Flow a lot in the future. A word of warning though: do not try to use this as a way of updating a data source. As I mentioned last time, when you run your query you’ll find Power Query/Power BI calls the web service twice. For example, I created a Flow similar to the one above that used the Insert Row step to take text sent to a Request trigger and add it to a table in an Excel workbook, and of course every time I refreshed my query I got two identical rows in my Excel table.

Read the whole thing.

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Making Cortana Work

Published 2016-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows how to integrate Cortana with dbareports via Power BI:

When you start using Cortana to query your data you will find that at times it is very frustrating. My wife was in fits of giggles listening to me trying to record the video below as Cortana refused to understand that I was saying “servers” and repeatedly searched Bing for “service” Whilst you can negate the effect by using the alternate names for the Q and A settings it is still a bit hit and miss at times.

This is an interesting post.

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SSRS + Power BI Desktop

Published 2016-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Peterson walks through the steps to check out the SSRS 2016 preview which supports Power BI Desktop:

SSRS 2016 supporting Power BI Desktop reports is now in preview on Azure. But for many of us, we’d rather be able to review this in our own virtual environment, and more specifically – VirtualBox. We’ll now you can.

Our starting point was a blog posting my Microsoft employee Christopher Finlan outlining the steps needed to setup this preview in a Hyper-V environment. A great start, but what we wanted was the ability to run it Virtual Box. Fortunately for us, running the downloaded VHD in VirtualBox is much easier than Hyper-V.

Click through for the instructions.

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Power BI Streaming Datasets

Published 2016-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to use Streaming Datasets functionality in Power BI:

This query does the following:

  • Reads the data from the Sales table in the workbook

  • Converts the data to JSON (for some background on how it does this, see here)

  • Sends the data to the streaming dataset using Web.Contents() to make a POST request. See this post on how to make POST requests using Web.Contents() and this post on the technique I’m using to handle HTTP errors manually.

  • Returns a table containing a message saying whether the data was updated successfully or not, and the time of execution like so:

There are some limitations on what’s available now, but getting streaming data out to Power BI can make a near-real-time dashboard possible.

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