Integrate with PowerBI

ModelOp Center seamlessly integrates with existing Business Intelligence (BI) systems, such as Power BI, to allow enterprises to allows users to create custom ModelOps-related dashboards, using existing IT investments.

Table of Contents

 

Introduction

ModelOp Center collects and persists detailed metadata about every model across the entire life cycle, from inception to production usage through continuous improvement in order to Govern the models. With all of that data, one challenge is to make the data visible and consumable in dashboards that can represent these key Model KPIs. Some of these KPIs include: What kinds of models are developed in your business? How many of those models are eventually delivering business value? What are the impacts of these models on your runtime environments?

ModelOp Center integrates with Power BI in order to allow it to provide enterprise grade BI tools to design your own reports rather than rely on built-in static reports.

Power BI Integration Setup

Power BI provides connectivity to external data sources through a custom Power Query Connector, allowing Power BI clients to load data from ModelOp Center.

ModelOp Center contains a package with the Power BI Connector file. Please contact your ModelOp representative to get the latest version.

For BI Creators

These installation instructions assume the following:

To enable use of the connector in Power BI Desktop:

  1. The Power BI Connector has a mez or pqx file extension. Copy this file into [Documents]/Power BI Desktop/Custom Connectors. You may need to create these directories if they do not already exist.

     

  2. Check the option (Not Recommended) Allow any extension to load without validation or warning in Power BI Desktop (under File | Options and settings | Options | Security | Data Extensions).

     

  3. Restart Power BI Desktop. There should now be an option to use ModelOp Data as a data source (under Get Data | More | Other).

     

     

  4. Upon selecting ModelOp Data, you will be prompted for the URL used to access your instance of ModelOp Center. This example assumes the ModelOp Center instance is accessible at https://my.modelop.example/.

     

  5. Clicking OK will open another prompt to select an authentication method. To access an OAuth2-protected instance, select Organizational Account | Sign In, then proceed to login using your ModelOp Center credentials.

     


    Upon successful login, Power BI Desktop will securely store an access token on your local machine and associate it with the ModelOp Center instance.

     

  6. Click Connect to begin building reports in Power BI Desktop.

     

Usage

Importing Data

To begin authoring a report, select any tables required and click Load.

The ModelOp Data Connector uses the ModelOp Center REST API to expose structured data as tabular views. Table columns follow a naming convention that reflect the structure or hierarchy of each resource.

For an optimal experience, avoid importing tables that are unnecessary for a particular report.

In scenarios where a report depends on many tables, Power BI Desktop may erroneously detect relationships where they should not exist. Be sure to double check which relationships are detected and/or missing when working with many tables in a single report.