Integrating Cumulocity DataHub with other products

Integrating Cumulocity DataHub with Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence tool which allows you to create and use interactive reports for data from various sources. These reports can also be built on your IoT data. Given your devices are connected with the Cumulocity platform, you can utilize Cumulocity DataHub to offload the data into a data lake of your choice. Then you can create a Microsoft Power BI report which is based on the data in the data lake. Cumulocity DataHub allows you to access and work with these reports from within the Cumulocity DataHub web frontend.

Prerequisites

Before setting up the connection to Microsoft Power BI in Cumulocity DataHub, conduct the following steps.

Accessing data lakes in Microsoft Power BI reports

Cumulocity DataHub leverages the native interaction between Microsoft Power BI and Dremio. Microsoft Power BI reports can consume data from data lakes using Dremio as query and data access layer. When creating a new report in Microsoft Power BI desktop, you can select Dremio as a database and establish a connection to the Dremio cluster, using the ODBC connection settings as provided on the homepage of the Cumulocity DataHub UI. With this connection you have access to the data lakes connected to Dremio.

In contrast to versions prior to 10.18, it is no longer required to deploy a Microsoft Power BI gateway. A native connector from Power BI Web to Dremio is available now.

Configuring access to Microsoft Power BI reports

To make reports available in its web frontend, Cumulocity DataHub embeds Microsoft Power BI content. Users neither must sign in to Microsoft Power BI nor need a Microsoft Power BI license to access the reports. For access authentication an Azure Active Directory service principal object with an application secret is used.

The following configuration steps are required, as discussed in detail in the corresponding Microsoft documentation.

As prerequisite you need an Azure Active Directory tenant. If you do not have an Azure Active Directory tenant, follow the instructions in the Microsoft documentation.

Next you must register an Azure Active Directory application, which serves as service principal. You must configure the service principal application to access the REST APIs of Microsoft Power BI, following the instructions on the Microsoft Power BI website:

1. Select Embed for your customers.
2. Sign in to Microsoft Power BI.
3. Register an application with respective permissions.
4. Skip creating a workspace and importing content.
5. Grant permissions to the service principal.

Alternatively, you can create a service principal application following the section Creating an Azure AD app in the Microsoft Azure portal in the Microsoft documentation.

Additionally, you must add a client secret for the service principal application. You can do that via the Azure portal. Search for App registrations, select your application by its name under All applications, and click the link next to the Client credentials entry on the Overview page of the application.

Next you can define a workspace to organize your reports. By adding the service principal application as a member or admin to the workspace, it can access the reports of the workspace. Go to the Microsoft Power BI website and conduct the following steps to grant the permissions:

1. Sign in to Microsoft Power BI.
2. Click Workspaces.
3. Select the context menu of the workspace to share with the service principal.
4. Select Workspace access.
5. Enter the name of your recently created service principal application and grant the Member or Admin permission.

Only workspaces granting access to the service principal application can be browsed from within Cumulocity DataHub. Once the workspace is available, you can publish reports to it and access it in Cumulocity DataHub.

Setting up the connection in Cumulocity DataHub

In the navigator, select Settings and then Microsoft Power BI to define the connection settings.

Once all settings are completed, click Save on the action bar to save the settings and establish the connection.

If you want to delete the settings, click Delete on the action bar. You cannot access reports afterwards.

Working with reports

Once the settings are defined, you can access and work with the reports.

1. In the navigator, select Microsoft Power BI. The menu entry is only shown if the connection settings are defined.

2. On the Reports page, click Add report in the action bar. A dialog opens with two dropdown boxes. The first dropdown box lists all workspaces which grant member or admin access to the service principal. Select the workspace you are interested in. The second dropdown box provides all reports of the selected workspace. Select a report from the dropdown box.

3. Click Select to open the report or Cancel to close the dialog without selecting a report.

The selected report is shown and can be interacted with. You can open multiple reports. For each opened report, a tab entry shows up in the action bar. To close the currently selected report, click Remove report in the action bar.