Summary
In the third post of our automation series we will focus on report and dashboard creation from within the Power BI web app. The intent of our dashboard today will be to show only a few key metrics:
- Incident creation by date
- Count of Incidents by classification
- Count of Incidents by Status
For more information on how we imported the data into Power BI please see the two previous posts in the series:
Automation Series 1, Part 1: Service Manager Dashboards in Power BI through Azure Automation
Automation Series 1, Part 2: Powershell and Power BI
The Solution
Let’s perform the obvious steps here first. We’ll need to login to our Power BI account that was associated with the Power BI Client ID that we used in the previous steps. Once we are logged in we should be able to find the datasource that we are looking for..
In this case that is the SCSMDataSet, so we are going to select the dataset. This will take us to a blank canvas, but with our toolbar on the far right…
This is the report editor and will allow us to create our graphic report using the available visual controls in the upper right…
And then just to the right of that is our Incidents table, which we can expand and view all of the available fields…
That completes the basics of the layout of the report editor, so lets start building our report. The first step here is to click the Id column. This will create a default TABLE in the view panel, listing all of our IDs…
Next, we are going to select the Classification column so that it is added to the table. Then click the pie graph visual 
. At this point the visualization may not make any sense, but drag and drop in the columns in the fields editor so that they look like this…
Now our first visualization should look correct, and depending on your data it should look something similar to this…
Congratulations, you’ve not created your first visualization, using real data from your environment, now available from anywhere via the cloud.
Now that we’ve let that get to our head, lets create two more visualizations. The first one will be Incidents by Status and it should be configured like the following…
And should then look like this…
Then for our final visualization, we want to use dates and demonstrate the number of Incidents created by day. For this one we can click the graph visualization first, which will put a empty visualization marker on our page. With that selected, we want to configure our visualization settings like this…
You’ll notice that I used a filter in this instance. I had a series of Incidents going back as far as a year, and this being a lab I had a large amount of empty space in the chart. I decided to use a filter to narrow down the data being displayed in order to make it a bit more granular. I ended up with something like this and you should have something similar…
With this, we now have our three primary charts all populated with data. I can now see my busiest days and even click on those days in order to see the status and classification of the various incidents created on that day (in this example I clicked on ACTIVE incidents)…
This is an incredible feature and lets you quickly see what the classification of active incidents is and when those incidents were created. If you’re live data chart looks like my demo data, you have some work to do!
Finally, how do we actually turn this into a dashboard that can be accessed from the Power BI mobile app?
Easy. Simply click on the pin 
and this will provide you with the option to add the tile to an existing dashboard or to create a new one…
Once you add the tile to a dashboard, you can add the other tiles in the same manner, and then we can view the dashboard as well as share it with whomever we like!
That completes our dashboard design post, so next time we will move into Azure Automation and put the final piece in place in making our design near real-time and automatically updating with the latest data.
Ready to transform your SCSM experience? View all of the exciting apps Cireson has to offer.
