I have spent some time in the previous
weeks looking at was what is the level of integration and support of some of
the existing analytics suites and the cloud and more precisely at some of the
existing reporting capabilities and services in the Microsoft Azure Cloud
Platform.
As people know, in today’s market the
software analytics and reporting tools are gaining in importance. Especially when coupled with some of the todays
big data, IoT and near real time processing solutions, the clear, concise and
easy to understand reporting and dashboard organized data become more and more
important.
As you might know, Microsoft has the Power
BI suite which is their mainstream business analytics product. This suite can be installed and used on
premises, as well as an online service.
It has an easy to use interface (in a true Microsoft fashion, it makes
it easy to do the straightforward things – I do not know yet what’s the
situation about the not so straightforward things 😊), as well as support for additional reporting libraries, or, if you
don’t find what you need you can build your own. These reports are customizable, you can
change the Look&Feel, color palette etc.
As an end user, you do not need to and you might not be aware about the
reporting technology powering these reports.
Furthermore, you can make use of an
existing Azure Cloud Platform service, which is called Power BI Embedded, which
we will discuss in more detail below.
You can use the Power BI online services in
two ways. One is to have Power BI
licenses for your organizational users and have them connect to the Power BI
online site in order to view their customized dashboards and reports; the other
is aimed towards ISVs. As an ISV, you
have the option to decouple the usage of reports from your application
users/clients, so that you do not need one Power BI license for each user
you’re going to support. You can
practically embed Power BI dashboards and reports into your own applications.
In order to be able to embed the Power BI
widgets, you will need dedicated Power BI processing resources which can be
provisioned through Power BI service (with the Power BI Premium subscription)
or by making use of Microsoft Azure Platform (by using Power BI Embedded).
With the reporting processing capability on
the cloud (Azure) – you could do that to take advantage of cloud features such
as high availability, elasticity and scalability - you can even keep your data
on premises or on another cloud solution such as AWS.
In that case, you will need to install and configure an on-premises
application data gateway from Microsoft, which is provided free of charge, that
can connect securely to Azure using the Azure Service Bus. This Gateway will provide ways to connect to
various on-premises or cloud-based data sources. Some data sources such as MS SQL Database,
SAP etc. are supported with real-time refresh while others can be configured
with scheduled refreshes.
In this case, your environment would be the
following. Power BI Service with a
Power BI pro license in order to house the reports that are being
developed. Power BI Desktop that will
be used for report development, and which will be used to deploy the reports in
the Power BI service. Dedicated
capacity provisioned on the Azure Cloud Platform (Power BI Embedded) in order
to be able to process the reports. And
Power BI Gateway (installed on-premises) if needed that will be able to
retrieve the data if the data sources are on-premises or located in another
cloud environment such as AWS. And of course, your cloud based web app that is embedding the Power BI reports, which could virtually reside anywhere.
