Showing posts with label Power BI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Power BI. Show all posts

Friday 9 June 2023

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 1 - Series Overview

Overview: Microsoft have great capabilities for logging and monitoring.  In this series of posts I will be examining the various parts of logging that may be useful in building solutions that are well monitored, provide alerting, easy tracing, and identifies issues or potential issues as soon as possible.

I am looking at App Insights for Power Platform monitoring.  So this includes: 

  • Power Apps (Canvas, and model apps),
  • Power Automate,
  • APIM, 
  • Azure Functions, 
  • Azure Service Bus, and
  • App Insights.

I shall be setting up a demo environment and these are the logical components being covered.


All the components making up the solution shall log into Log Analytics (left-hand side of the diagram).

For Continuous Integration, my clients will be Postman monitor (it's awesome and so easy to use all those postman collections), DevOps is great and I'll use it to run smoke tests after new releases.  I also use flows, to report on flows (sounds nuts but i love it).  These are at the bottom of the diagram. 

Lastly on the right of the diagram, I look at extracting logs for reporting (Power BI), and Monitoring using Azure DevOps (p.s. think about Grafana instead of DevOps Dashboards, it so nice).

Couple of extras are: Availability Logging, alerting, automating Canvas app testing, Playwright.  

From the diagram, you can see the data is now held in Log analytics and it can be queried via Log Analytics or App Insights using Kusto.  Note: the syntax is slightly different.

Series

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 1 - Series Overview (this post)

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 2 - App Insights and Azure Log Analytics 

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 3 - Canvas App Logging (Instrumentation key)

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 4 - Model App Logging

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 5 - Logging for APIM (this post)

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 6 - Power Automate Logging

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 7 - Monitoring Azure Dashboards 

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 8 - Verify logging is going to the correct Log analytics

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 9 - Power automate licencing

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 10 - Custom Connector enable logging

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 11 - Custom Connector Behaviour from Canvas Apps Concern

Tip: The Power Platform Admin Centre has a good overview of the Power Platform, but to make logging and monitoring better push data into Azure Log analytics and monitor and alert centrally.

Also seeView and download Dataverse analytics - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Wednesday 26 October 2022

Reporting from Dataverse HLD options


Overview
:  Recently I was looking at reporting from the Dataverse/CDS and I drew up these options that give the business various options but the overhead grew as the solution improves.  Client is on the MS stack so I have looked at the reporting options, There are a ton of variations but this is a good start for my options.

Reporting options from the Dataverse

Synapse, can be replace by any Data warehouse or Data lake solution and as Dataverse is not massive could also just use regular SQL Server for reporting.

Power BI can be replaced with other tools such as Tablau but for embedding and the MS stack, Power BI makes the most sense.

Friday 6 March 2020

Power BI Notes

Overview:  Power BI is for reporting  and analytics of your data.  There are basically 2 ways to show Power BI Reports: User specific and app specific.

Power BI Embedding Models:

  1. User Specific/User Owned Data - Call the Power BI services as yourself/the current user using delegate permissions. 
  2. App Specific/App Owned Data - Call the Power BI service using a generic app permissions.  For example a public website, no Power BI licence required and every user of the site has the same access to view Power BI data.

Thursday 12 December 2019

PL-900 Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals Beta Exam

Overview:  This morning, I took the PL-900 Beta exam; it is seriously tough.  I don't think I passed but let us see as the results come out 2 weeks after the beta is closed.

My Thoughts: The exam covers three products: Power BI, Power Apps & Power Automate (formerly called Microsoft Flow) but is extremely wide-ranging on relying Microsoft technology.  You really need to have worked in detail with the products as the questions were not straight forward and often combine multiple related services/products.

What I learnt:  You need to know the 3 products well, and how the interact.  My connectors knowledge could be better, CDS comes in a lot, and my Dynamics 365 knowledge is lacking.  There were some Cognitive service questions that I was not ready to deal with.  It is a good test of knowledge, that has helped me realize I have holes in my knowledge on the Power Platform.

The exam itself:  Microsoft exams become easier as you learn how they ask questions, I found some of the language and questions difficult to follow.   What is the question actually being asked but this is pretty standard in a lot of Microsoft certification exams.

I did the exam remotely using Pearson/VUE software, which is great.  No need to book and go to a test centre.  They check your environment and identification and watch you throughout.  I got a warning for reading aloud, which until that point was awesome as the wording of the questions is not the easiest to understand, but it makes sense as people could record the questions using audio for cheating with brain dumps.

Summary:
  • I am convinced that I failed PL-900.  
  • I learnt a lot preparing for the exam and it was a good experience.
  • I need to look at Dynamics & Cognitive Services in more detail.
  • Remote exams are awesome and secure the way they are done & don't talk to yourself during the exam.
  • I've missed taking Microsoft and other certifications.

Wednesday 3 April 2019

PowerBI Pro for Licencing

Problem:  Requirement to provide reporting and dashboards quickly and securely at a reasonable price.

Hypothesis: There are great reporting solutions and a couple of enterprise leading products are TableauQlik.  These can get pretty expensive installing and paying for licencing.

Proposed Resolution: PowerBI Pro (PowerBI Premium is for larger enterprise solutions) is a cloud based solution that can connect to multiple data source and on-prem using the Gateway.  E5 licences include the PowerBI Pro licence for creating and publishing reports.  E3 licence can get a add-on for about £7.50 per month.  This is only needed by the people creating the reports.
 
To paraphrase "You can embed the report (not dashboard) on a SharePoint web page and share it with company users. You will then only be needing one licence to publish the report. The downside of this option is there is no builtin security for the report. Anyone who has access to the web page can access the report."

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and understanding, pls check your licencing with Microsoft and a licencing professional.

Updated: Nov 2022
3 Power BI licence types:
  1. Free (per user)
  2. Pro (per user per month) $
  3. Premium (resource/capacity based)  $$$ - 2 options
Choose depending on usage patter, so Premium is great for enterprises level but out of the range for most SME businesses.  Feature and pricing comparison

Tuesday 21 November 2017

Power BI online integrate into SharePoint on-prem. extranet Architecture

Power BI Embedded Online Licencing as of 22 Nov 2017:
Basically, there are 2 parts to licencing PowerBI online.
1.> You licence per the number of pages you render per hour.  You need to have the Power BI Embedded licences on infrastructure to serve up a certain number of requests per hour. So work out your peak number of page request per hour and licence for the appropriate plan.  The table below shows the Power BI Embedded plan you'll need to subscribe to:

PlanVirtual CPUsRAM (GB)Max Request per hour
A113300
A225600
A34101200
A48252400
A516504800
A6321009600
Note:  I believe the plan's can be scaled up or down instantly without display and pausing a service stops the Power BI embedded costs.  If you run over the Max requests per hour I believe the Power BI PaaS will still serve up page/reports but you will get an extra bill for the additional reports.

2.> You'll also need to purchase at least 1 Power BI Pro licence, that is used for: administration, content publishing, and development..
3.> As of time of writing (Nov 2017) the Microsoft Power BI Gateway does not offer High Availability (HA), but I'm sure it is coming soon.
4.>  A single account is used to connect to each source and RLS security has to be applied at the source (SQL SSAS), user table mapping is required.



Also see:
http://blog.sharepointsite.co.uk/2017/10/power-bi-on-prem-extranet-information.html
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded-row-level-security


Friday 9 June 2017

SharePoint on-premise reporting options

Overview:  As always this really depends on the circumstances but my broad view on reporting for SharePoint is outlined below.

Thoughts:

  • Power BI on-prem. has not been release (at the time of this blog) but will work for SSRS reports and have the Power BI functionality that shall be embedded using an iFrame into SharePoint 1st edition only.
  • The upgrade path from SSRS SharePoint integrated mode is going to be hard, whereas the upgrade path from SSRS native mode will be simple.
  • Power-BI on-prem is not going to support SAML.  Use WAP (Web Application Proxy)/reverse proxy to get NTLM ot Kerbros tickets for authentication.  Only config is ADFS+WAP to access PowerBI on the Extranet.  If you use another Federation service will need to do a passive claim.  For Example if you use SiteMinder, you need to pass onto ADFS + WAP
  • SSRS SharePoint integrated mode shall be available only in SP2013 and SP2016 and not have any continued path going forward.


SharePoint 2013 Options:

SharePoint 2013 BI Options SharePoint 2013 SQL BI Options
Excel Services
PerformancePoint
SharePoint KPI/Filters
SSRS SharePoint Integrated Mode
Power Pivot for SharePoint

The table below shows what you client probably uses historically and the challenge is to map them out to a supportable solution on SharePoint going forward.

BI in SharePoint and the Microsoft stack has drastically changed over the past 2 years.  The next 12 months should keep this pace up with the release on Power BI.  As my knowledge in this area improves I'll update this post.

Other Posts that may be useful:
A good post to read as of EOY 2016 on BI  for SharePoint
SP2013 with SSRS 2012 SharePoint integrated Mode Overview
Installing SSRS on SP2013 Reporting Post