2016-08-13



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In my search for a highly customizable dashboard for displaying data harvested from connected Particle Photon & Electron devices I have come across many different solutions but none of them provide the flexibility Microsoft Power BI does

Thanks to @gusgonnet for bringing my attention to this service

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

You can pull in data from tons of different sources and use that data in your custom dashboards specific to your particular needs. There are over 60 different platforms you can currently pull data from and this list is growing quickly since Microsoft has a team of over 500 employees working on Power BI.

Here is a list of services that you can quickly pull data from so that you know:

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Now another huge plus from my point of view is that you or your clients can quickly see the custom dashboards you create on any of the mobile platforms by just downloading the iOS, Android, or Windows Mobile app and then logging in to their account. You do not need to create a custom iOS, Android, or Windows Mobile app or deal with keeping it up to date which is a major time consumer.

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Once you create a dashboard, you can easily share that dashboard online via a web page or blog post using their simple share button which creates an iFrame code that you can embed. That is very nice! You can then track how that link is begin used via their built-in analytics.

Today Gustavo posted a link from PubNub's latest Blog post that announced that they are working with Microsoft to make it easy to get data that is in a PubNub account to show up in the Power BI dashboard so you can use and view it.

That blog post is here: https://www.pubnub.com/blog/2016-08-11-microsoft-power-bi-integrates-pubnub-for-realtime-data-visualization/

In that article, there is a link to a tutorial from Microsoft showing how to add a PubNub data stream to Microsoft Power BI so you can display it however you want within a Power BI dashboard.

Here is the link to the tutorial that Microsoft BI created:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-real-time-streaming/

Now in this tutorial I learned that you could use the Power BI REST API to capture and log streaming data sent by an IOT device. Below is a snippet directly from this tutorial about getting data into Power BI.

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So I think this is great since it sounds like we should be able to send data directly from the Particle Photon to Microsoft Power BI by using their API functions. Then Power BI will display that data live and also store that sensor data into a database so you can see historical data also.

The Microsoft Power BI, REST API documentation, is here: http://docs.powerbi.apiary.io/#reference/datasets

I'm clueless on how to work with REST API's, but I'm posting all this in case somebody smarter than me is interested in exploring this and creating some code that works

I know that we can send data from the Photon to the PubNub service and get this working, but since Power BI can accept data directly from a Photon if I understand everything correctly then it is probably the most efficient way to get data over to Power BI. Let me know if I'm off base here or not.

I shared this because I'm excited about being able to create beautiful custom dashboards for my products exactly how I have been envisioning them.

I don't know if pushing data directly into an Azure database is better or cheaper, but I would like to explore driving data directly into Power BI using the REST API if others are willing to help figure out how to do that.

I would also love to hear what @Dave @zach @BDub @will @zachary think about the Power BI platform and if it's something Particle would be interested in supporting via a Plugin or something.

Thanks for your time!

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