Power BI Architecture Intro

by Ross McNeely

Practice Manager, Enterprise Data Management

Power BI Architecture is about aligning the technical components with business strategy. Correct alignment will ensure Power BI can support business teams, divisions, and the enterprise. Formalizing Power BI Architecture reduces the time needed to translate business requirements into PBI requirements. The deliverables from the Power BI Architecture process will help the business to fully utilize the entire PBI Platform including the new emerging features.

Create connections to all your data sources, and perform data cleansing and transformations. Model your data easily within the built in modeling tool. Explore your data with advanced analytics that are similar to excel. Develop custom interactive reports for your business. You can then publish your content to the Power BI Service with a Power BI Pro license.

The PBI Service is a Software as a Service platform capable of supporting your team, division, and enterprise. Power BI Pro licensing allows you to publish and share reports within the service that are accessible anywhere. Collaborate with colleagues by grouping your dashboards, reports, and paginated reports into an app and distribute. Pro licensing adds a centrally managed security for data protection and row-level security. Power BI Premium licensing extends these capabilities across the entire organization (Individuals publishing content require a Pro lic.).

The native Power BI mobile app allows for secure access and view of dashboards, and reports for Windows, iOS, and Android. Very useful for viewing KPIs on the go. Power BI Desktop allows you to author the same report for desktop and mobile users. Runs in Power BI Service.

Purchasing Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium licensing enables you to also use Dataflow. You can connect to a variety of business data sources. Then clean the data, add data transformations, and then load the data into the Common Data Model in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Once the data is loaded into the Common Data Model you create Power BI datasets. Automated Machine Learning is also available through dataflow, but are limited with Power BI Premium and Embedded capacities only.

Setting up a gateway between Power BI Service and on-premises data sources creates a security connection to transfer data. This gateway can support several Microsoft could services including Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate, Azure Analysis Services, and Azure Logic Apps. Monitoring these gateways will help to prevent bottlenecks during peak demand.