What is the best way to connect customer insights to powerBi?
Is the customer insights (beta) connector better or an azure synapse link to the dataverse better? what is the difference between both?
Hi,
The sustainable approach to use Customer insights in PBI is to depend on the different options that Dataverse connects to PBI. Since Summer '22 each CI instance is paired with a Dataverse environment, which gives our customer access to a wider range of fully released PBI integrations. See Dataverse's documentation hub for it: Use Power BI using Microsoft Dataverse data - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
The Customer insights team is working on writing data generated by CI into Dataverse as tables. Currently we do this for eight tables, see Work with Customer Insights data in Microsoft Dataverse - Dynamics 365 Customer Insights | Microsoft Learn.
Hi OpeOsibemekun,
Connectors focus on storing and finding data, and azure synapse focus on analyzing data.
The Dynamics 365 Customer Insights connector provides a set of APIs to interact with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights instances.
Synapse Link enables you to build Power BI dashboards with no performance or cost impact to your transactional workloads, and no ETL pipelines. With DirectQuery, you can build dashboards using live data from your Azure Cosmos DB accounts, without importing or copying the data into Power BI.
I think you end up in very similar place either way. For most tasks, the Customer Insights connector works fine. I've had a few hiccups with it over the years with large record counts but all in all it's fine. You'll have each of the entities listed as a source and can quickly and easily do what you want.
If you are using BYODL the entities will also all be sitting in your lake, which gets you to nearly the same place. I've use Synapse Link for Dataverse quite a bit but not sure I follow on the distinction. In general it just is a means to push all your dynamics data into a lake and keeping it in Sync. Unless there's a specific use case you're thinking of I'd just generally use the PBI connector.
ONe thing to keep in mind.. there are a lot of 'what ifs' but the general models you build in PBI, with fact tables and dimension tables, you''ll ultimately use activities as the fact tables and customer as guests. Many to many relationships can be problematic depending on the structure and in a lot of cases, you'll already have created your measures in CI and the logic can be duplicative.
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