PowerBI Report Build/Templates Community Share

Hello, 

We heavily use Power BI reporting, we currently have an on-prem assyst environment and we are mid-flight on a project to migrate it IFS SaaS. As part of this it includes amending all of our existing report data sources to the new SaaS database.

We also use CSGs to differentiate our data for different customers, I have a wide variety of reports and I am happy to knowledge share with you all. I also like to see how different people have used the assyst db and data for thier reporting.

Hi Mitch, 

We had previously been using Crystal Reports for our reporting requirements which allowed us to develop an understanding of the database tables and how they link together, so when we did a previous on-prem upgrade it was decided at the time to start to use a more intuitive data analytics tool and Power BI was chosen.

We started by trying to re-create the reporting output from Crystal Reports where we started with a Daily Operations reports and this quickly increased onto a Periodical Reporting Pack for all of our customers to self-serve and now we have dozens of reports and a huge backlog for more.

We interrogate the database directly with custom SQL queries we have written ourselves and we report from a dedicated reporting db which is replicated every morning from the production db, we have also created reports which are using the production db as the data source.

Those reports using the reporting db we have a daily or weekly refresh schedule, these are the reports which are larger in data size. The reports which are using the production db can refresh several times a day dependent on the requirement as these are used to give a relatively real-time view of the status of tickets in the system.

The Power BI data gateway is a bit limited in the refresh schedules you can create and are limited to daily or weekly, so those reports which are only required to refresh monthly for example I have used Power Automate to setup that schedule.

We publish our reports on the Power BI service and then share with whoever requires access, we have also published some reports direct to a Teams site and also on some of our internal SharePoint Intranet sites.

As I mentioned in my previous comment we are very close to migrating from on-prem into IFS Cloud so in preparation for this I am going through an exercise to take a copy of my existing on-prem reports changing the data source to the IFS Cloud db so they are ready to be re-published once migration is complete. We have identified our most critial reports to prioritise on day zero of migration.

This is a great initiative and I would be interested to see what other customers are doing in this space. We are a SaaS customer and are just starting to develop reports and dashboards in Power BI using the assystREST API and our data warehouse.

Note that IFS had ‘integrated Power BI’ in their roadmap at some point but it seems to have disappeared.

Hi Paul,

Is there anything we can track with regards to that getting scheduled or will it be updated here somewhere in the community?

Hi All, 

It’s good to see that PowerBI reports are something that the community are asking for. As Paul has stated we do have a bunch of PowerBI reports that were developed based on the SDI best practices however they aren’t quite ready to be published as they need to be re-worked to utilize the database rather than the API.

We’re aware there is appetite for pre-packaged PowerBI reports that could be provided to and run by customers and the work to do these is currently being considered by the product team. What I’d suggest for you guys is to log an idea for this in the ideas portal and we can then keep you up to date with any movement on the PowerBI reports via that channel. This will also allow other customers who are interested to register their interest in the idea too. 

By all means though feel free to share reports amongst yourselves on the community site, that’s one of the main purposes of this community!

Cheers,
Robert

@lstanczyk,

If you are an On-Premise customer then you can use an On-Premise Power BI Gateway to connect your SQL Server or Oracle assyst database to the Power BI Service. You should also be able (depending on your network permissions) to connect directly to an assyst database using the appropriate database connector in Power BI Desktop for developing reports. Though, probably not wise to connect to your production database for developing.

If you are a SaaS customer you will need a read only copy of the database in Azure and then use a Power BI Gateway to connect that database to the Power BI Service which I believe the SaaS team can set up. I am not sure of the exact details, so speak to our SaaS team for more (and probably more correct) information and what costs there are, if any. This will not work for Power BI Desktop. For that you would need a copy of the assyst database on your local machine or on your network (say a copy of your test version of assyst) to develop reports from.

Paul

@Istanczyk

If you are talking about Aurena then you are not after help with IFS assyst the relatively recently acquired ITSM/ESM tool. This section is for IFS assyst only not any other IFS product. I know nothing about connecting to Aurena’s data. Could you post your request in the appropriate area so the relevant people can pick it up. Thanks.

Paul