How to connect Power BI Reports to your data

There are two options for reports – either you can have Nasstar host / manage your reports and share them to relevant people in your organisation, or you can install and manage them yourself.

Installing reports in your tenant

You will need an account with:

• Microsoft Power BI access
• Licenced for Power BI Pro (standalone, included in E5, or organisation via Power BI Premium)
• Ability to create Power BI workspaces – some organisations restrict this

Modality will share report files with you (pre-populated with connection info to your database) and securely share the SQL credentials needed.

Recommended report structure

We recommend you use separate workspaces for Usage & Governance and Calls & Meetings reports. This combines similar reports together, but the two may have different groups of end users.

These can then be published as Power BI Apps into your organisation.

Create workspaces

In Power BI, go to Workspaces > Create Workspace. Give it a suitable name and click Save.

ref: Create the new workspaces – Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Upload report .pbix files

In your workspace, click New > “Upload a file” and select the .pbix (Power BI report) file.

Repeat for each file to be added to the workspace.

Set credentials and refresh schedule

On the dataset for each report, click on the Schedule Refresh button.

Under Data source credentials, click “Edit Credentials” and put in the SQL credentials given.

Under Scheduled Refresh, flip the slider to On. Add a time to refresh – as there are multiple reports refreshing, stagger times within the same workspace to avoid performance issues. We recommend one refresh per day unless more are necessary. Add any notification email for refresh failures.

Publish workspace as a Power BI app

The best way to share access to the reports is by publishing as a Power BI app. In the workspace, click on “Create app”, then click Permissions and add any people you want to have access. Finally, click “Publish app”.

For full details of setting you can use: Publish an app in Power BI – Power BI | Microsoft Docs  

Note that all people using the reports will also need Power BI access, and a Power BI Pro (or equivalent) licence assigned.