PowerBI File-Driven Dashboards
Blueprint's build-in dashboards can be augmented with additional, customizable dashboards powered by Microsoft PowerBI. These PowerBI Dashboards are displayed directly within Blueprint. Pre-defined PowerBI Dashboards are provided. If you have PowerBI skills these can be modified or entirely new dashboards created.
The pre-defined PowerBI dashboards include the following:
Value Analysis
Maintenance Analysis
Operational Analysis
Commands Analysis
Creating the PowerBI Dashboards
You first need to create PowerBI Report containing dashboards. Once this is done, in the next section you'll configure Blueprint to display these dashboards for the user.
The graphic below illustrates the flow of information to create the dashboards
- Data for a selected Blueprint scope (i.e. Project or Folder within a project) is extracted from Blueprint using a Blueprint Utility and output to a spreadsheet.
- PowerBI desktop, using the provided project template, pulls data from the spreadsheet and automatically populates pre-defined dashboards which are then published to PowerBI cloud.
- When the Blueprint user opens the Custom dashboard in Blueprint, it presents the dashboards published to PowerBI cloud in the previous step
The steps to create the PowerBI report containing the dashboards are as follows:
Use Blueprint Utility to Create Excel Workbook
- Run the Blueprint Utility. Enter the Blueprint URL and your credentials. Then enter the numeric ID of the project or folder whose data you want to export. Once the report has been generated, download the Excel file.
- Rename the Excel file to something more readable (e.g. "valuemapping data for project X")
- Open the Excel file and in the sheet "OperationalStatsArtifact" sheet, enter values into the two columns "Value per Hour" and "Maintenance Cost", then save, then close the workbook.
Value per Hour: This is an estimate of how much business value in dollars is produced every hour the bot is run
Maintenance Cost: This is an estimate of the maintenance cost in dollars of the bot for the time-window of operational data (e.g. week, month, quarter)
Use PowerBI Desktop to Create Dashboards to Cloud
- Download this, PowerBI Template Project rename if you like, then open it in PowerBI Desktop
- In PowerBI Desktop select File > "Options and settings", then "Data source settings"
- Hit the "Change Source" button at the bottom, then select the spreadsheet exported in step1, then hit OK then Close to dismiss the pop-up
- In the yellow bar that appears, choose "Apply changes". You should see the spreadsheet being accessed and data refreshed. If successful, the pop-up will disappear when done, and the dashboards will reflect the new data
- In the ribbon hit the "Publish" button and follow the prompts to publish the report to PowerBI cloud.
In the next section you'll configure Blueprint to display the dashboards you just published.
Configuring Blueprint to Display PowerBI Dashboards
To enable the PowerBI dashboards within Blueprint you must enable the Custom Dashboard feature in the Administration area, and provide the appropriate settings to draw from PowerBI.
- Name of Custom Dashboard: Enter a name that will appear as a label for dashboard selection in the user area.
- Title: Enter a title for the dashboard. This will not appear to the user. It is only used internally by Blueprint to manage connections.
- URL: Enter the URL of the PowerBI report. You can get this URL from PowerBI Cloud as follows:
- Open the PowerBI report that you wish to embed in Blueprint.
- In the PowerBI report, Select File > Embed report > Website or portal
- Two values will appear. Copy the first one "Here's a link you can use to embed this content", and paste into the URL field in Blueprint.
Once these setting have been configured properly, you should see an additional Dashboard in your user area that uses the name you entered for "Name of Custom Dashboard".
Refreshing the Dashboards
The data in the dashboards can be refreshed as follows:
- Perform the steps in the above section "Creating the PowerBI Dashboards" > "Use Utility to Create Excel Workbook", to create an updated Excel workbook
- Rename the Excel file to the name you defined earlier in section "Use Blueprint Utility to Create Excel Workbook"
- In PowerBI Desktop open the same project as earlier, and hit the "Refresh" button in the top ribbon
- Once the refresh operation has completed, hit the "Publish" button in the top ribbon and follow the prompts to publish the report to PowerBI cloud
To Access the Dashboard:
- Choose RPA Dashboards dropdown in the main header
- Click the tab with the name of custom dashboard