Is it possible to have Power BI Reports in a VMs local repository in Azure? How about the report access being on the VM's local repository?
Lets say our VM's local address in Azure is 10.0.2.1.
When distributing a Power BI dashboard or report the link that is being sent or accessed is for example: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=asubisdiucibsdibciasb:
This means the viewing of the Power BI report is not on the Azure VM local repository
We want it so that we can view these reports on our Azure VM Local repository like so https://10.0.2.1:8080/powerbi/usagereports/report1
In this way we are not going through Powerbi.com to view the reports but just our own links/repositories.
Thanks
Power BI reports can be deployed to the Power BI Service (app.powerbi.com) or Power BI Embedded (an Azure service that does not run on a VM). With either of those options you can use REST APIs to embed the reports in a website that's running on a VM (but that's still possibly not what you want because it is still reaching out to an external Power BI service to render the report).
I would suggest you look at the new Preview of Power BI reports in Reporting Services that will ship with SQL Server vNext. It may do what you want.
Related
I have a ODBC datasource and I'd need to use it with PowerBI. It works fine locally.
In order to refresh data and keep user up to date, I need to send this data do cloud (Azure/BlobStorage) then PowerBI can connect directly into Blob Storage and consume the data.
As discussed here stackoverflow-topic , we need an on-premises server to have this ODBC running.
It sounds a quite confusing to me as we need the data on cloud, using ODBC as datasource and "publishing" the data with Blob Storage, and for that, we do need a local server.
I'm very begginer with Azure Cloud but... don't we have any other way to have this process configured without local server or a expensive Virtual Machine on Azure? Looks like we are running in circles here.
Thank you!
Your options:
Install Power BI Gateway (standard mode) on a server to host the ODBC driver
Install Power BI Gateway (personal mode) on your PC to host the ODBC driver
Copy the data to Azure (Blob Storage or Azure SQL Database, etc), and configure the Power BI Model to load the data from there instead of ODBC
Manually refresh your data in Power BI Desktop and re-publish it to Power BI whenever the data needs to be updated.
For Option 3 you can use any tool you want to copy the data to Azure. Azure Data Factory is one option, and for that you would need to install the Self-Hosted Integration Runtime to host the ODBC driver. But you can also extract the data to files and copy them to Auzre Storage with AzCopy.
I am creating a report in Power BI, where some data is imported from a cloud storage system. There is also a local data source (an excel sheet) being used.
My question is, if I publish this report on Power BI service and share it with someone, will they be able to see visuals using local data source as well?
There is also possibility of using Sharepoint. I can create a team in Sharepoint with the local excel file and use that as a source in Power BI. Am I correct in assuming this way people in my sharepoint team will be able to see all data in the report?
For your scenario with a spreadsheet from a desktop and a cloud data source:
If you prepare the report using import mode in PowerBI desktop and publish it to PowerBI online, then that report data will be visible to all users with access to the report in the provisioned workspace. The caveat is that data will not be able to be refreshed from the Excel file once the report is deployed online. When you create the report on your desktop, you have access to the cloud data and the spreadsheet, then a copy of that data is published to the PowerBI service. When PowerBI service is set to refresh, then it can't connect to your desktop and causes the issue.
To solve this you either need a personal or standard gateway. This provides the technology for PowerBI to connect to your on-premise (standard gateway) or on-desktop (personal mode) data. Once the gateway is in place, PowerBI can pull data in to the cloud from an on-premise network or a personal desktop to refresh reports.
The other alternative is, as you mention, putting the excel in SharePoint online. This effectively makes the spreadsheet a "cloud data source" and can be refreshed from PowerBI service without the need for a gateway.
I have recently started using MS Power BI, and have come across a problem which seems inconsistent, and the answer likewise.
I am connecting to an Azure SQL database, and therefore have chosen this as the data source in the desktop app. Everything seems to be working just fine, and I can create tables, graphs and whatnot. One thing is off, though: When I choose Azure SQL DB as the source, the connection dialog box does not appear to be any different than if I just choose (non-Azure) SQL DB. Puzzling.
The other thing, which is actually the main issue: In Power BI (the website), I can open my published reports, but some of them don't show up, and I get an error message in a pink bar at the top, saying the data source is not available because the gateway can't be reached. I am well aware of this, because I have deliberately stopped the gateway service (PBIEgwService) running locally, because I have read several places that if the data source is Azure, an on-premises gateway is not needed. (E.g.: "Question: Do I need a gateway for cloud data sources like Azure SQL Database?
Answer: No! The service will be able to connect to that data source without a gateway." here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-onprem-faq)
So in short: Why does PBI not (always) connect directly to Azure?
And yes, I have checked the credentials. I can connect just fine in PBI desktop.
Are you allowing Azure Services to connect in your Azure SQL firewall?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-firewall-configure#manage-server-level-ip-firewall-rules-using-the-azure-portal
I have power bi configured on Azure, a dataset reading its data from excel document which is updated on daily basis.
The refresh is done manually through powerbi desktop. After I click on refresh, my reports and dashboards are reading updated figures, I open it from power bi desktop; however if I open it from any browser, data is not updated, I will have to publish my power bi reports and dashboards from power bi desktop publish button in order to see my data updated from browser.
Power BI desktop is the development tool for powerbi.com, after you have published it to powerbi.com, it has no relation with your offline .pbix file. Publishing it again (with the same name), will overwrite the file with it's data.
So a local refresh in power bi desktop has no influence on the file in powerbi.com
If you want that powerbi.com can read data from your excel file (on Premise), you'll have to setup a powerbi gateway. More information on following link:
Power BI gateway personal mode
On-premises data sources
A personal gateway is required in order to refresh datasets that get data from a supported on-premises data source in your organization.
With a gateway, REFRESH NOW and SCHEDULE REFRESH are supported for datasets uploaded from:
Microsoft Excel 2013 (or later) workbooks where Power Query or Power Pivot is used to connect to and query data from a supported on-premises data source. All on-premises data sources shown in Get External Data in Power Query or Power Pivot support refresh except for Hadoop file (HDFS) and Microsoft Exchange.
I had to uninstall my "on-premises data gateway (personal mode) and reinstall updated version. it is working now.
I successfully managed to connect a java application to Power BI REST API and managed to create a dataset and added some data.
I can view this data from Power BI web interface, make reports, graph etc.
Is it possible to connect Power BI Desktop to this datasets and create custom reports from there?
I'm asking this because the desktop application seems to be more complete. You can edit column names, merge tables, etc. all things that are not available in the web application.
Thanks all for the help.
The Power BI Desktop does not support connecting to real-time data sets in the Power BI service at this time.
Could you submit this as a request to https://ideas.powerbi.com?
It is possible to use REST API Dataset in Power Bi Desktop since April 2017 and it worked for me in the latest version of Power BI Desktop.
But even though you can create reports based on datasets from Power BI Service, you still cannot edit column names, merge tables, etc.
The features is called Power BI service Live connection.
To establish a connection to the published report, and create your own report based on the published dataset, select Get Data from the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop, and select Power BI service. You can also select it from Get Data > Online Services > Power BI service.
After the report is finished, you can publish your report by selecting Publish from the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop.
More details on Power BI documentation page.