This blog post covers the latest updates for Power BI Developers community. Don’t forget to check out our last developer blog post, if you haven’t done so already.
Embedded analytics
Here is the list of updates for Embedded Analytics…
Power BI Embedded in Azure
Self-service big data prep and paginated reports support in Azure capacities
Azure resource health monitoring
Zero downtime capacity scale
Embed capabilities
Usage metrics for report and dashboard authors
Automation & life-cycle management
Create a new workspace experience through API
Power BI Embedded in Azure
Self-service big data prep and paginated reports support in Azure capacities
Dataflows and Paginated reports are now available on Azure capacities. Until now, your capacity resources were used exclusively to run queries on your dataset but now new services (named ‘Workloads’) are available to use the same resources in the capacity. They will join the existing data querying load, which is now called ‘Datasets workload’. Dataflows make data preparation easy, so fewer specialized skills are required to transform and clean up data.
Dataflows is available to embed Power BI reports and dashboards. Paginated reports are still not available for embedding, but you can use Azure capacities to test the new workload in Power BI.
Use the Power BI admin portal to get started for now, and Power BI REST API in the coming weeks. You can set the maximum memory consumed to give you control of your capacities. For more information, see configure workloads and Default memory settings.
New capacity Metrics to monitor workloads
To ensure that you can proactively manage your workloads, we support monitoring through Azure Resource Monitoring Metrics. Two new metrics allow you to monitor and subsequently set Azure Alerts per workload:
- Memory Per Workload– presents the usage of memory in your capacity resource per workload.
- QPU Per Workload – presents the query processing units load on your capacity, per workload. A Query Processing Unit (QPU) is a unit of measure of relative computational performance for query and data processing. 1 core approximates to roughly 20 QPUs so with an A1, for example, you have values between 0 and 20 QPUs, where 20 represents 100% load.
The existing Memory and QPU metrics cannot be broken to specific workloads and will always show the total load on your capacity. To monitor workloads separately, use the new metrics. The remaining metrics, namely ‘Memory Thrashing’, ‘Query Duration’ and ‘Query pool job queue length’ are relevant only to Datasets workload.
The images below illustrate how you can select ‘Memory per workload’, for example, in your Power BI Embedded resource, go to ‘Metrics’ and choose ‘Memory Per Workload’.
click on ‘Apply splitting’ and select to split by workload to obtain a view presenting the memory per each of your workload (Dataset and Dataflows in the case demonstrated).
Viewing Memory Per Workload for the enabled workloads Datasets and Dataflows.
Azure resource Health monitoring
Power BI Embedded is integrated with Resource Health monitoring. Resource Health helps you monitor the availability of your resource and diagnose the root cause in case of unavailable status. Any status change will be reported in real-time.
You can find the Resource Health info in your resource blade in the Azure portal, under ‘Support+ troubleshooting’ (see image below). You can also view Power BI Embedded health alongside all your managed resources in Azure, under the main ‘Resource Health’ page.
In addition to checking availability in Azure portal, you can monitor your Power BI Embedded capacity automatically and set alerts and actions to be taken upon status change.
Zero Downtime Capacity Scale
To remove the delay in content availability when a Power BI capacity resources scales up or down (in Azure portal or using ARM API), we have introduced the Zero-Downtime-Capacity-Scale PowerShell sample script, that calls the Power BI API and ARM REST API to programmatically scale capacity resource with no downtime. This means all embedded content is available during the scaling process. It also provides an option to reassign workspaces from one capacity resource to another.
The script avoids downtime by creating a temporary capacity resource, and reassigning the workspaces to it during the scaling process. Once the procedure is completed, the workspaces are assigned back to the original capacity resource and the temporary capacity resource is deleted. You can find this script and other automation scripts in Power BI PowerShell samples repository.
Embed capabilities
Usage metrics available for embedded reports and dashboards
Power BI enables authors of reports and dashboards to measure their impact using the ‘Usage metrics’ report. This feature is now available for authors of Power BI content when you are embedding for Power BI users in your organization.
The report shows the usage patterns across an organization and can help drive projects, make informed decisions, and provide valuable usage information, such as:
- The frequency at which each type of content is viewed.
- Areas for investment to improve analytics or increase user engagement.
- Executive view of analytic engagement across the organization or customers.
Note that when embedding for your customers (non-Power BI users), you will not be able to see usage metrics on reports and dashboards. Learn more on Usage metrics for reports and dashboards.
Automation & life-cycle management
Create a new workspace experience through API
Use the Power BI REST API to create new workspace experience automatically.
A new parameter, added to the existing ‘Create Group’ API, will create the new workspace (Preview).
https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups?workspaceV2=true
An API with this new parameter will create a new workspace (Preview), while regular calls without the new parameter will continue to create the existing workspaces.
Come and meet us!
Meet Power BI embedded analytics experts and participate in the following breakout session and Instruction-led labs:
· Talk: Power BI for Developers
· Talk: Workshop: Embedding Power BI Analytics – Part 1/2
· Talk: Workshop: Embedding Power BI Analytics – Part 2/2
If you are puzzled or run into few issues, be sure to check our resources that can help you get by:
- ‘Troubleshooting’ doc to help you get by all the obstacles on your way for building a great app.
- FAQ doc to answer all your question regarding the Product, licensing and Azure capacities.
- Community forum for developers, to seek answers or ask any other questions you have.
Custom Visuals
Context menu and drill through is now supported
As of API 2.2 context menu and drill through features are supported.
With drill through report authors can create a page in their report that focuses on a specific entry. By right-clicking on a data point in other report pages they can drill through to the focuses page to get details that are filtered to that specific context.
To support context menu:
public update(options: VisualUpdateOptions) {
//...
//handle context menu
this.svg.on('contextmenu', () => {
const mouseEvent: MouseEvent = d3.event as MouseEvent;
const eventTarget: EventTarget = mouseEvent.target;
let dataPoint = d3.select(eventTarget).datum();
this.selectionManager.showContextMenu(dataPoint? dataPoint.selectionId : {}, {
x: mouseEvent.clientX,
y: mouseEvent.clientY
});
mouseEvent.preventDefault();
});
For more details, please check out this article.
Visuals with additional purchases can now be submitted to the marketplace!
The custom visuals marketplace has been growing rapidly over the past months, and it’s time we take a step forward. As such, we’re changing the policy so that custom visuals with additional purchases may also be submitted to AppSource.
What is a visual with additional purchases?
A visual with additional purchases is similar to in-app purchase (IAP) adds-in in the marketplace, those adds-in have a price tag "Additional purchase may be required".
IAP custom visuals are free, downloadable custom visuals – users pay nothing to download those custom visuals from the marketplace. IAP visuals offer optional in-app purchases for advanced features.
What’s in it for you?
IAP custom visuals in AppSource, will be discoverable to the many daily visitors, bringing valuable traffic and increased awareness for your IAP custom visuals and to you as the developer.
If until recently you managed those visuals through your website, now you can submit them to AppSource. Which will increase the level of discoverability and visibility of the IAP visuals inside the Power BI community.
Visuals in the AppSource enjoy a Direct feedback channel from your customers who are using the IAP custom visual, through the reviews and rating system in the store.
Once the IAP visual was approved by the AppSource validation team, you may also submit those visuals for certification. It is an optional process.
Once the visual is certified, IAP custom visuals can be exported to PowerPoint and displayed in the emails received when a user subscribes to report pages. So today by submitting IAP visuals to the marketplace, IAP custom visuals can also be certified and support extra feature set.
What is changing in the submission process?
The IAP custom visuals submission process to the marketplace, is same process as for free visuals. It happens through the seller dashboard. The only change to the submission process is that you’ll need to state in the developer notes in the seller dashboard: “Visual with in-app purchase”. You’ll also need to provide a license key/token, if required to validate the paid/advanced features.
In addition, please let users know what to expect by providing in your store long description which features are free and which features require additional purchases to operate.
What should I do before submitting my IAP custom visual?
If you’re working on an IAP custom visual or already have one, please make sure that it complies to the guidelines.
If you have a logo in the custom visual, make sure it complies to the guidelines (color, location, size and action triggering) as described in the guidelines.
You can also find, in the guidelines, best practice notes. One of the notes relates to the landing page API, which will be available during this month (please follow our blog for updates).
The landing page is the first page displayed when user inserts the visual into the report.
Today custom visuals' first time insertion page is a permanent watermark. Once we release the API, you will be able to edit this page and add information on how to use the visual, features, and license related issues.
Can I get my IAP custom visual certified?
Yes, same with free visuals. Once your IAP custom visual is approved by the AppSource team, you can submit your visual to the certification process.
Please note that in order to certify your visual, it should comply to the certification requirements, for example the visual cannot access external services for licenses validation. This should be done within the IAP visual if you want to certify it.
Recall certification is an optional process, it is up to you to decide if you want your IAP visual to be certified.
How to get support?
Feel free to contact the custom visuals support team: pbicvsupport@microsoft.com with any question, comment, or issue you may have.
Looking forward to your contribution to the custom visual community!
As always, feel free to use all the communication channels at your disposal to connect with our team, share your thoughts and ask questions:
- Community
- Contact us for support- pbicvsupport@microsoft.com
That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue sending us your feedback, it’s very important for us. Have an amazing feature in mind? please share it or vote in our Power BI Embedded Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.