Shortly after Premium capacities were announced for Power BI, I published a post titled Understanding the Power BI Capacity Based SKUs to help the Power BI community understand how this new license model worked. With the recent announcement of Microsoft Fabric, that model got a little more complex. Admittedly, it’s not the same radical departure that Power BI Premium was initially – in fact, it’s based on the same model, but there are several nuances that are worth understanding. Adam Saxton recently addressed Fabric licensing on Guy in a Cube here – Understanding Microsoft Fabric Licensing an ..read more

Man – that’s a boring title. But it’s accurate. A few months ago, I posted an article outlining how to connect Power BI to Azure Application Insights and Azure Log Analytics (jointly referred to as Azure Monitor) with Direct Query. This article describes an approach that allows you to use a native Kusto connector to connect to the Azure Monitor instance as if it were an ADX cluster. This allows for Direct Query to be used, among other things. The option connecting Power BI available through the Azure Monitor UI uses an html connector to query the respective APIs, and that connector doesn’t sup ..read more

Microsoft Lists debuted in 2020 and they are a (yet another) great way to organize list-based data. Now, when someone says data, I think Power BI. Obviously, we’ll want to report on this data, but how do we do that? There is no Power BI connector for Microsoft Lists. The answer is quite simple, if not completely obvious. You need to use the SharePoint Online List connector in Power BI. Microsoft Lists are the same thing as SharePoint lists. In fact, they ARE SharePoint lists. The Microsoft Lists service is just a new user interface for interacting with them. You can use Lists all you want and ..read more

Excel is an excellent tool for analyzing data. An analyst can easily connect to and import data, perform analyses, and achieve results quickly. Export to Excel is still one of the most used features of any Business Intelligence tool on the market. The demand for “self-service BI” resulted in a lot of imported data being stored in overly large Excel files. This posed several problems. IT administrators had to deal with storage requirements. Analysts were restricted by the amount of data they could work with, and the proliferation of these “spreadmarts” storing potentially sensitive data created ..read more

The combination of Power BI and Application Insights (AI)/Log Analytics (LA) is a powerful one. These tools provide a quick, convenient, and relatively cheap way to collect and analyze telemetry on a wide variety of applications. One drawback of AI/LA is that any data query will return a maximum of 500,000 rows, which can be quite constraining in some cases. This article describes a way to work around this limit. In this example, we’ll be working with an Application Insights instance that is being populated by the WordPress Application Insights plugin – in fact, it’s the one used on this very ..read more

Have you ever wanted to show your time data in different time zones simultaneously? Or allows users of the same report to display time values in their own time zone? This article outlines one approach for doing so. If you’ve spent much time building reports for users in more than one time zone, you’ve likely come across a few of the idiosyncrasies of Power BI and date/time values. In fact, if you’ve worked with time zone values in Power Query and you don’t happen to live in the UK) , you’ve likely noticed that your reports show different time based values when they get published to the service ..read more

At Microsoft Ignite this week, the Power BI team unveiled the next generation of the architecture for their “dedicated capacity” customers. This architecture promises to resolve many of the issues experienced with the first generation of Premium, and opens up several possibilities moving forward. Gen-1 The Power BI dedicated capacity SKUs (which include Premium) were introduced 3 years ago in order to provide a scalable pricing model, and to provide predictable performance. Unlike the Pro SKU, which is licensed per user, these SKUs represent specific sets of resources running in Azure. There a ..read more

The license for the rest of us Today at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of a new licensing model for Premium features in Power BI entitled “Premium per User”. With this model, individual users, or subsets of users can subscribe to most of the capabilities of Power BI Premium for an additional monthly fee. For a preliminary FAQ about this new license, read this official blog post from the Power BI team. Three years ago, Microsoft introduced the capacity based Premium license. Prior to this, the only license available for Power BI was the user based Pro license, w ..read more

One of the features that has never made the leap from SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on-premises to the cloud is data-driven subscriptions. Users can subscribe to reports, but a data-driven subscription allows individual subscriptions to be stored in a central location and parameterized, while delivering the reports to multiple locations. This article will describe a pattern for accomplishing this using SharePoint lists as the subscription store, and Power Automate as the automation tool, for a no-code solution to this requirement. **Updated – Sept 24 2020** The new Power Automate “Expor ..read more

In the April 2020 release of Power BI Desktop, A new preview feature was debuted which provides an easy way to filter your report down to a rolling time period through the relative time slicer and filter. If you’ve tried this feature, you may have noticed that the results are not exactly what you might expect, unless you live in a very specific time zone. This article will show you how to design around this behaviour. The problem is that the relative time that is evaluated by these two controls is always evaluated against UTC times. It assumes therefore that the time that you provide to it is ..read more