Power BI - Dashboard Usage

Power BI is a Microsft business analytics tool to analyze data and share insights to your application, it provides a different view for business and CxO users with their most important key information at one place, updated in real-time and available in all other devices. 

There are two version of Power BI usage:
1. Desktop version Power BI
2. Web Version  Power BI Online

Both of them have their capabilities based on the platform additionally, the desktop contains a whole suite of tools to create models, to Build models and create visuals and Web would also provide to create visuals and Sharing options.

Power BI - Desktop:

We have used Power BI desktop version to implement Dashboard for the one of our Web Application. It is easy and to built and publish to your app based on your customized view.

There are so many data source provide by Power BI - for more detail of supported source are here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-data-sources

Configuration Steps with Data Source as SQL Database:

Installed and open Power BI Desktop - with an authorized credential.

Select the data source that you needs to show on the dashboard for a web application.

Import the Visual based on your requirement and drag into the main panel and select the dataset.

below is the sample configured visual dashboard with sample dataset.

After completion of visual and setting up data set - Publish the Dashboard for live usage and it would be ready to integrate for your web application.

To keep dashboard and report up-to-date with your on-premises data source - There is a gateway to set up for keep source as refreshing on the certain scheduling interval.

Power BI - Benefits:

1. Any time any location and any device access to the dashboard.
2. Ability to fetch progress of current Task, Client, and resources progress.
3. Ability to Share – User can share with anyone from anywhere in the world.
4. Increased visibility and getting a more business plan without having to look for manual effort.

I hope above information will help you guys to set up Power BI basics and for more information please review Microsoft Power BI reference site.

Automation Process - Azure Storage Account To Azure Media Service Encoding Process

Today, I would like to share detail on automation process that we implemented in our recent development work.

I split blog in three division so that it would help for better understanding. 

Problem Statement:

We had implemented Cloud service for existing library files to process Azure media encoding and transcribing process so that it processed all the thousands of files successfully.

Now- Based on new requirement end user would upload files from the web application and that newly uploaded files would store in Azure Storage account.

We have to reuse existing cloud service source code logic so that it would process new uploaded media file for encoding and transcribing job.

The solution we design:

As we approach Azure function and mediator to communicate cloud service, new media upload.

Below is the high-level cross-functional diagram.

Actual Implementation: 

Azure functions is a solution for easily running small pieces of code in the cloud. we can write just the code you need for the problem at hand, without worrying about a whole application or the infrastructure to run it. 

We have implemented an Azure function in a language of choice, such as C#, F#, Node.js, Java, or PHP. 

We created in C# as per below code snippet so that once new blob upload from web to storage account it would auto trigger and send a message to blob queue.

#r "Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage"

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Blob;

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Queue;

public static void Run(CloudBlockBlob myBlob, string name, ICollector<string> blobQueueItem, TraceWriter log)

{

log.Info($"C# Blob trigger function Processed blob\n Name:{name} \n URI: {myBlob.Uri} ");

blobQueueItem.Add(myBlob.Uri.ToString());

}

On other ends Cloud, service would de-queue message and send new uploaded assets to process encoding and transcribing service.

 CloudBlobClient sourceCloudBlobClient = sourceStorageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();

CloudBlobContainer sourceContainer = sourceCloudBlobClient.GetContainerReference(AppConfiguration.SourceBlobContainerName);

CloudBlobClient amsCloudBlobClient = amsStorageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();

 CloudQueue AzureCloudQueue = AzureQueueClient.GetQueueReference(AppConfiguration.blobqueuename);

 var azureQueueMessageList = AzureCloudQueue.GetMessages();


I request you to share your thoughts on the same and I would really appreciate if you could provide your valuable feedback.

Thanks!!!