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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ... / Power BI report creati...
Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ...
Suggested Answer

Power BI report creation using Entity store after Go-live

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Posted on by Yunus Shaik 330

Hi,

I have the below queries regarding Power BI reporting. Please provide your inputs and suggestions on below-

1) After go-live, how can I connect to D365 Entity Store and create a report in PBI Desktop from a normal computer (not from the developer/VM environment)? Is this possible if we store our Entity Store in Azure Data Lake?

2) My understanding is that- It is possible to publish a Power BI Report (created using Power BI Desktop in the developer VM) to Power BI Service (instead of deploying it in D365). I assume that we cannot edit an existing Power BI Report in Power BI Desktop after moving to production environment. This would mean that after moving to production environment, we will be unable to publish the Power BI Report based on production data to Power BI Service. Is that correct? (Since we can only edit the Power BI Report in developer environment, if we publish such a report to Power BI Service, it will only be based on development data)

3) What are the solutions available to edit an existing Power BI report connected to Entity store after go-live? I can think of the following:

• Edit report in Power BI desktop in developer environment, mark as release candidate, then it will be deployed using package in the production environment

• Edit report in Power BI desktop that is connected to Entity Store via Azure Data Lake and is published to PowerBI Service

Please let me know if my understanding is correct and if there are other solutions.

4) If we store our Entity Store data in Azure Data Lake, do the report viewers only need a Power BI Pro license to access it? Is a D365 license not necessary (since we are storing the data store in Azure Data Lake and not directly connecting to D365)?

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  • Yunus Shaik Profile Picture
    Yunus Shaik 330 on at

    Anyone please suggest

  • Suggested answer
    Ian Waring Profile Picture
    Ian Waring 436 on at

    We had similar questions before our very first go-live. In sequence:

    1) Yes. You either access the data live using ODATA connections to <production instance URL>/DATA or you push entities to an external BYOD SQLserver instance using Data Management. For the latter, you can then access the data using a DirectQuery connection. Both work either from Power BI Desktop or once published, on PowerBI.com. The only gotchas are that Microsoft tend to recommend not doing PowerBI connections using ODATA if it can be avoided. A further nuance is that some entities are marked private and can't be seen from ODATA connection; another is that some useful tables are not visible by default (things like Customer Transactions, which is bar far the easiest resource to establish if a specific invoice has been marked as paid following a customer payment receipt.

    2) The report once published on PowerBI.com can do exactly the same as it does on PowerBI Desktop, whether you're using a development instance or your production once; only difference is the source URL to go fetch the data. You can furnish the PowerBI.com report settings to use either the login credentials of the user accessing the report, or a fixed other username/password (for instance a service account on your Azure SQLserver instance). You can also allow users, at your option, to be able to download the .pbix file for a model residing on PowerBI.com and open it on PowerBI Desktop locally.

    3) Just publish the report to PowerBI.com from PowerBI Desktop, leaving it in a folder accessible to your users. That is all.

    4) There is a preview of Azure Data Lake with Entity Store Trickle Feed (aka Project COMO) in the PEAP program. This allows you to have close to real-time access to any list of entities or tables you request and which mirror the Production state a few seconds behind - at DirectQuery speeds. We're due to know more about potential General Availability dates later tonight. This will be brilliant when accessible to all Dynamics 365 Finance customers. We're all a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription so get PowerBI Pro for all our users, so I don't know whether a lower licensing tier will work.

    FWIW we did buy 10 users' worth of PowerBI Premium to try out some of the KPI features, but found that those users couldn't publish reports accessible to our Power BI Pro users. Looks like you have to be all in on the same license for Power BI across your organization, otherwise, extra complexity ensues!

    HTH.

    Ian W. 

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