Power BI and Active Directory for System Administrators

Active Directory and Power BI

One of the most interesting things about Power BI is that it covers a wide range of areas. Therefore, it can help a wide range of different users to analyse and understand their businesses easily. For instance system administrators can use Power BI to analyse  their Microsoft Windows Active Directory. As a matter of fact, Power BI and Active Directory can work together very nicely so that a system administrator can create high level reports and dashboards.

In this , we’ll create a report of the following charts:

  • Total number of computers by Operating System/Service Pack
  • Total number of  computers by year and Operating System
  • Total number of computers
  • Print pages per minute by printer
  • Total number of printers by year and driver name

As a system administrator you can create heaps of other useful reports.

Get Data

  • On Power BI Desktop click “Get Data” then click “More”

Power BI and Active Directory 01

  • Click “Other”, click “Active Directory” then click “Connect”

Power BI and Active Directory 02

  • Enter a Domain name then click OK

Power BI and Active Directory 03

  • As you can see there are 374 tables you can select to create heaps of reports. In this post I use “Computer” and “PrintQueue”

Power BI and Active Directory 04

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Data Visualisation with Power BI Desktop

As most of you guys know Power BI Desktop is released. I should say, it’s awesome. There are heaps of changes in compare with its preview edition Power BI Designer. I’ve written a series of posts regarding creating a report and dashboard using Power BI Designer before. You can find them here. Now I want to explain the same thing in Power BI Desktop. I’ll cover lots of new features in this post and I hope you enjoy it.

Get Data

  • Open Power BI Desktop
  • Click on Get Data. You can also get data from recent data sources or even open a predefined report stored in pbix format

Power BI Desktop 01

  • We use Adventure Works DW 2012 database as sample, you can open your real world data source
  • Click on “SQL Server Database” then “Connect”
  • In this sample we are connecting to a “SQL Server Database”
  • Click “Connect”

Power BI Desktop 02

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Refreshing On-Prem SQL Server Database on Power BI using Power BI Personal Gateway

image It’s been awhile that lots of us were waiting for this feature. And some of us like me just tried to build it in our way. I spent some time to develop something similar using OData in combination with IIS and Basic Authentication features. Well, it was sort of successful and unsuccessful simultaneously! I mean, I was able to refresh SQL Server data remotely, but, when it came down to refreshing the dataset uploaded into the cloud Power BI it just failed. It was mainly because of the method that Power BI uses to refresh data.

By the way, I’m glad to see that we are finally able to refresh an on-premises SQL Server database from Power BI website. Refreshing data is very crucial for every report and dashboard which is working on top of frequently changing database.  So we need to be able to schedule a data refresh on the cloud. Yesterday Microsoft announced a new gateway specially designed for supporting data refresh for on-premises data sources as below:

  • SQL Server
  • Oracle
  • Teradata
  • IBM DB2
  • PostgreSQL
  • Sybase
  • MySQL
  • SharePoint List
  • SQL Analysis Services Tabular model (uploaded data, not live connections)
  • File (CSV, XML, Text, Excel, Access)
  • Folder
  • Custom SQL/Native SQ

As you see SQL Server is not the only one.

Installing Power BI Personal Gateway

It’s easy to install the Gateway. Just make sure that meet the following requirements:

  • The machine that you’re going to install the Gateway on it should be always up and running
  • You can NOT install the Gateway on the same machine as a Power BI Analysis Services Connector

image

What is new for BI in Excel 2016

It’s been awhile that we are waiting for a sensible improvements in Microsoft self-service BI. The good news is that finally there will be some cool new features added to the next version of Excel which is Excel 2016. By some, I mean, well, there not a lot new BI features, but, some. Something is better than nothing, not too bad though!

Integrating BI features with Excel:

Power View and Power Map:

As you know, Power Pivot was integrated as a built-it feature to Excel 2013. Now I’m really happy that the same thing happened to Power View and Power Map. So you don’t need to install them separately. You can now turn these features on from:

File–> Options–> Advanced-> (scroll down the page) Data-> Enable Data Analysis Add-ins: Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map

image

OR you can still turn them on from “COM Add-ins”:

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