Licensing is always an important topic for any technology, often it can drive architectural decisions. In many cases, licensing models can be difficult to understand, particularly since vendors tend to not like to dwell on discussions of cost. My last post on Fabric licensing was an attempt to help to clarify some of the “squishy” language around licensing for the recently introduced Microsoft Fabric. That recent post centers on the cost for Fabric compute, but there is another licensing component to Fabric – for storage. With the GA of Fabric last week at Microsoft Ignite, the time is approac ..read more

Power BI has been able to work with Excel files since it was first introduced. Indeed, it was born from the analytic capabilities in Excel. Users can connect directly to Excel files by using the Power BI service and nothing but a browser. However, depending on the content of the Excel file, and the method of connecting, the resulting products can be very different. In this post I will attempt to clarify this behavior. A subsequent post will detail the options available when working with Excel files in Power BI Desktop. File Structure Excel is a multi-purpose tool. It contains all the building ..read more

Microsoft Lists debuted in 2020 and they are a (yet another) great way to organize list-based data. Now, when someone says data, I think Power BI. Obviously, we’ll want to report on this data, but how do we do that? There is no Power BI connector for Microsoft Lists. The answer is quite simple, if not completely obvious. You need to use the SharePoint Online List connector in Power BI. Microsoft Lists are the same thing as SharePoint lists. In fact, they ARE SharePoint lists. The Microsoft Lists service is just a new user interface for interacting with them. You can use Lists all you want and ..read more

The combination of Power BI and Application Insights (AI)/Log Analytics (LA) is a powerful one. These tools provide a quick, convenient, and relatively cheap way to collect and analyze telemetry on a wide variety of applications. One drawback of AI/LA is that any data query will return a maximum of 500,000 rows, which can be quite constraining in some cases. This article describes a way to work around this limit. In this example, we’ll be working with an Application Insights instance that is being populated by the WordPress Application Insights plugin – in fact, it’s the one used on this very ..read more

At Microsoft Ignite this week, the Power BI team unveiled the next generation of the architecture for their “dedicated capacity” customers. This architecture promises to resolve many of the issues experienced with the first generation of Premium, and opens up several possibilities moving forward. Gen-1 The Power BI dedicated capacity SKUs (which include Premium) were introduced 3 years ago in order to provide a scalable pricing model, and to provide predictable performance. Unlike the Pro SKU, which is licensed per user, these SKUs represent specific sets of resources running in Azure. There a ..read more

Application Insights (AI) and Log Analytics (LA) from Microsoft Azure provide easy and inexpensive ways to instrument applications. Using just an instrumentation key, any application can send operational data to AI which can then provide a rich array of tools to monitor the operation of the application. In fact, the blog that you are reading uses an Application Insights plugin for WordPress that registers each view of a page into an instance of AI in my Azure tenant. Application Insights data can be queried directly in the Azure portal to provide rich insights. In addition, the data can be exp ..read more

Shortly after Premium capacities were announced for Power BI, I published a post titled Understanding the Power BI Capacity Based SKUs to help the Power BI community understand how this new license model worked. With the recent announcement of Microsoft Fabric, that model got a little more complex. Admittedly, it’s not the same radical departure that Power BI Premium was initially – in fact, it’s based on the same model, but there are several nuances that are worth understanding. Adam Saxton recently addressed Fabric licensing on Guy in a Cube here – Understanding Microsoft Fabric Licensing an ..read more

If you use Azure, chances are that you’ve used Application Insights. Application Insights collects telemetry data for web applications, and allow that telemetry to be queries, analyzed or used to alert for any anomalies. It’s backed by the Kusto engine, which makes it possible to query and aggregate substantial amounts of data very quickly. It also relatively inexpensive. Depending on the nature of your data, however, you may find yourself bumping into one of its limitations. In most cases these limitations can be overcome by “upgrading” to AI’s big brother, Azure Data Explorer (ADX) which is ..read more

In the April 2020 release of Power BI Desktop, A new preview feature was debuted which provides an easy way to filter your report down to a rolling time period through the relative time slicer and filter. If you’ve tried this feature, you may have noticed that the results are not exactly what you might expect, unless you live in a very specific time zone. This article will show you how to design around this behaviour. The problem is that the relative time that is evaluated by these two controls is always evaluated against UTC times. It assumes therefore that the time that you provide to it is ..read more

Man – that’s a boring title. But it’s accurate. A few months ago, I posted an article outlining how to connect Power BI to Azure Application Insights and Azure Log Analytics (jointly referred to as Azure Monitor) with Direct Query. This article describes an approach that allows you to use a native Kusto connector to connect to the Azure Monitor instance as if it were an ADX cluster. This allows for Direct Query to be used, among other things. The option connecting Power BI available through the Azure Monitor UI uses an html connector to query the respective APIs, and that connector doesn’t sup ..read more