What is Power BI?
Power BI is a Microsoft intelligence tool for analyzing, visualizing and transforming raw data into beautiful charts, graphs, and maps from your data. It helps access data from hundreds of sources to allow organizations to make data-driven decisions. To clarify, users can create personalized dashboards with no technical skills and support required. In this way, practically anyone in the organization can easily create beautiful custom reports and analytics.
Power BI and Domotz
The report created with Power BI can also include data coming from the Domotz network monitoring system. In other words, users can use the Domotz Public API to create custom reports on speed tests, RTD information, SNMP sensor charts, network, and device status.
Learn more on how to create custom network reports in Power BI Desktop using the Domotz custom connector.
Power BI templates for Domotz
Domotz has also created an out-of-the-box Power BI template, which is designed to help you get some insights about your monitored networks. However, this template can also be customized to meet your reporting needs.
Domotz Power BI templates include four dashboards:
- Network Highlights
- Network Inventory
- Device Performance
- SNMP/TCP
Learn all about Power BI templates for Domotz.
What is an on-premises Power BI gateway?
Power BI gateway is software that is required to access data situated in an on-premises network. If anyone needs to access on-premises data from a cloud or web-based app, the gateway manages the request. The on-premises Power BI gateway provides quick and secure data transfer between data that isn’t in the cloud called on-premises data and several Microsoft cloud services. By using a gateway, organizations can keep databases and other data sources on their on-premises networks, yet securely use that data in cloud services.
Learn more here about what is an on-premises data gateway.
Why use Power BI gateway?
Did you create your report in the Power BI Desktop on your local computer and published it to the Power BI service?
Power BI gateway gives you the possibility to schedule an automatic refresh of your reports or an on-demand refresh.
Learn more about the gateway used in Power BI – how to install, configure and use it…
How to get started with the Power BI gateway
Get ready to use the data gateway in Power BI by following these five simple steps:
Step 1: Download the standard mode of the Power BI gateway and install it.
Step 2: Start it and login in with your credentials.
Step 3: Create a new Power BI gateway with a custom name, for example, “myDomotzGateway”.
Step 4: Open the connectors settings tab and copy the domotz.mez file in the default directory proposed by the interface, in this example “C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\PBIEgwService\Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors”. If the directory does not exist, create it. Make sure to have the last version of the domotz.mez file.
Step 5: See the Domotz connector loaded after your gateway service is restarted:
How to configure Power BI service to use the Power BI gateway
Firstly, open the “Manage Gateways” section in the Power BI service:
Secondly, select “Allow user’s custom data connectors to refresh through this gateway cluster”:
Then add the Domotz data source:
The last step is to provide your Domotz Public API credentials – use the API endpoint as Username and the API Key as Password:
How to use the data source to refresh the data
Create your report starting from the Domotz template for Power BI. Do not select a time frame when opening the template.
Publish your report when you are done.
As a result, you’ll see both – the report and the dataset in the Power BI service workspace:
Proceed with opening the “Settings” of the datasets from the menu to open “Gateway Connection”:
As a result, you are now allowed to refresh the dataset assigning the newly-created data source:
In addition, on the same settings page you can also configure the automatically scheduled refresh:
In this tutorial, you’ve learned about the Power BI gateway. We went through the installation and the configuration of the gateway and the connection of the Power BI dataset to it.
