Hi Mitch,

Yes we would definitely be willing to join in best practice/report sharing. We are a SAAS customer and currently do not have a CSG aware reporting solution outside of the Assyst Report templates. We are working with IFS to get a SQL reporting node but this is still in the very early stages. Happy to have comms as we progress 

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 Chris,

At this point being new to PowerBI we are looking to essentially replicate more of the basic assyst reporting into PowerBI from the standard BIRT reports that are available with each release before we try to get into the more advanced analytical reporting.  

What if anything did you do when you first started from your on-prem instance?

Is there anything you would be willing to share with how you’re polling your current on-prem reporting database that we could review as we are on-prem for the next couple of months to trial or shape a strategy to consider when we jump fully to SaaS?

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.

@John Byrnes Hi guys do we have any plans on providing PowerBI example reports along similar lines that we do with BIRT today like these from the Wiki IFS Distributed Reports - assyst11-5Wiki (axiossystems.com)? 

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.

Just to let you know that we at IFS have developed 17 Power BI reports based on the SDI Global Best Practice Standard for Service Desk V8 recommendations using the assyst REST API. Unfortunately, we found that the assyst REST API was not really designed for reporting due to the limited filter options and the lack of paging support (it is really designed for data entry and updates) so we are looking to convert these to use SQL before we make them available. That work has still to be scheduled.

Hi Paul,

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

@moconnor1 I do not have control of the schedule so I have passed that question on to those that do.

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

I am looking for somebody who could tell me how to connect Power BI to the data. I am not even sure where to start. Is there some documentation that you found? 

@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

@paulc I am on the cloud version (Aurena). It sounds like I need to open a ticket with support, but I am not even sure what to say in it. 

@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

Hi, I just came across these PBI examples for IFS Cloud → they’re  for ERP, not specifically for assyst, but maybe some of you will find it useful.

https://docs.ifs.com/Power%20BI%20Example%20Content/