Power BI

Owned by Richard Goerwitz
Last updated: May 24, 2022
2 min read

Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft business analytics service, available generally as part of Office 365.  It can be run from a local on-premises server or from the cloud.  It provides interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, where end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on information technology staff or, worse yet, database administrators to create these reports and dashboards.

Power BI reports and dashboards are available from any major browser on any major internet-connected platform (Windows, OS/X, Android, etc.).  There is also an IOS and Android Power BI app.

Carleton, as of 2018, uses the cloud-based offering, and reports/dashboards are accessed generally at http://app.powerbi.com/.  Grade reports (which were the first broad Power BI-based campus offering) are available here.

Power BI reports and dashboards are created either online via the web interface (link above) or, better yet, through Power BI Desktop and deployed to the cloud.

Licensing

Power BI Desktop, the app, is free.  But using Power BI in the cloud is not free.  It requires a license, which is autoprovisioned into Office 365 (as of May 2020) by FIM.  If users need Power BI licenses or ask for them, they are almost certainly asking for this.  Assign tickets to whoever is currently managing FIM (Les as of 2020), or to Richard.  The relevant FIM sets to manage here are as follows:

Gateways

Power BI reports, even though cloud hosted, can interact with data sources inside Carleton's network.  This is done via the On-premises Power BI Gateway service (named as such in the MS Windows services GUI; actual name is PBIEgwService).  This service is running (as of June 2018) clustered on two servers,

There is an On-premises Data Gateway app on both of the above servers that may be used to check versions numbers, start/stop the service, and (temporarily) up the logging level.

Either server may go down or be upgraded without affecting service.  Documentation on adding/dropping members from the above cluster is available from Microsoft:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-high-availability-clusters.

User Help

Users needing help should submit requests for help to the help desk, and tag the requests as data warehouse requests.

Note that if a faculty member has trouble getting grade reports, the problem may be

  • Lack of internet connectivity
  • Current non-Faculty status (i.e., not included in AD Faculty group; see Les about this)
  • No grades available (e.g., new faculty member)
  • Unable to authenticate using Carleton's SAML provider (same issues as other logins - CHECK THIS FIRST)
  • Not licensed for Power BI (Helpdesk can't make this determination; assign to Richard Goerwitz; or go to Dan Stephans)
  • /wiki/spaces/itskb/pages/26119351 is down on /wiki/spaces/itskb/pages/26139125 (Helpdesk can't make this determination; assign to Richard Goerwitz; or go to Dan Stephans)
  • Gateway to data warehouse is down (Helpdesk can't make this determination; assign to Richard Goerwitz; or go to Dan Stephans)

Richard Goerwitz
Created:  2018-06-16