Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Power bi integration

I would like to inform you that we are planning to implement Power BI analytics (embedded and customized both) in Dynamics 365 F&O for one of our client. As per current available solution for customized power bi report we can use BYOD and Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 as data source/storage to connect Power BI with Dynamics 365 F&O data. Apart from that we have two more options to access the Dynamics 365 F&O Data directly by OData Feed and Dynamics 365 (Online). However for huge volume of data as per Microsoft guideline it’s not recommended to use the both options. It has been observed that for embedded standard power bi report AxDw data warehouse is being used by direct query. In case in some scenario if the both BYOD and Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 (not even any external data storage) is not available to access the service; could you please let us know is there any other way to access the Dynamics 365 F&O data directly for creating a customized/new power bi report?

Hi Supriyo,

You may want to ask your question on one of the other forums D365 Finance/Supply Chain as it may gain more traction there.

From my understanding of F&O you have a number of options.

1. Entity Store - Std Entites (a lot based on the old AX12/09 "perspectives") out of the box give lots of reporting capabilities which are exposed to the F&O workspaces (E.g. Financial Analysis - All Companies). Users can add to these entities or modify the existing ones to suit their requirements (i.e. add financial dimensions to them). The premise of the entity store is for "Aggregated measurement" and shouldn't be used for pulling all transactional data but you can use this to create real-time customised BI reporting. This functionality doesn't require additional PowerBI licensing.

2. Data Lake - New functionality which copies the production "Tables" into a separate DB to be consumed by PBI using a Pro license. This has an additional cost to the business but the benefit is you could ,if you wish, copy the whole PROD DB in to the data lake and report from this as well as hooking in external data sources to merge data. etc..

This option for me is the most powerful one in terms of reporting.

3. BOYD - Bring your own database. This uses the data Entites not the tables to report on the data. This could mean some development costs to add fields or create new entities if your data isn't present in the Std data entities.

Other than these options you are limited to reporting against F&O Production data.

Hope this helps

Mark

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