Using the new Application Insights content pack for Power BI, you can get fresh insights into your users in a customizable dashboard and collection of reports. The visualizations include a map showing the locations of your users by country/region as well as both summary statistics and time-series of their activity.
If you have already set up Visual Studio Application Insights to monitor your application (which is easy), this content pack provides a great extension to your capability to visualize trends in your application’s usage over the past 30 days. With Power BI you can combine data from multiple sources on the same dashboard, so you could, for example, pull sales data and website usage into the same real-time presentation.
It takes two minutes to set up. Here's an example of the dashboard that you get straightaway:
The map shows where this application’s users are, and the chart shows how many users there have been past 30 days.
Naturally the dashboard is easy to modify so you can quickly get the data that's most relevant for you to show up where you want it. Even better, this is super easy to set up! Let’s have a look…
Two minutes to a dashboard
It takes just a couple minutes to get an Application Insights dashboard up and running using Power BI. Let's walk through the process here.
- Go to your app’s Application Insights overview blade in the Azure Preview Portal. You’ll need some information from here shortly. (If you haven’t yet set up Application Insights for your app, take a few minutes to do that now.)
- Go to the Application Insights content pack in Power BI, choose Get Data, Services, Application Insights, and then Connect.
- On the “Connect to Application Insights” page, copy and paste the 3 required values from the Azure Preview Portal to Power BI:
- On the next page, simple press “Sign In” (leave the Authentication Method as OAUTH2), and if prompted for credentials, provide the credentials necessary to access your application in the Azure Preview Portal.
- Power BI will now import your data, and in about another minute, you’ll see a dashboard like above for your own application!
Summary
Now you’ve got a dashboard to display your application’s vital usage statistics (number of users, sessions, geography, etc.) You can choose other ways to present the data, rearrange it, or combine it with data from other sources.
This is the first iteration of the Application Insights content pack, and with all the great abilities of Power BI there’s certainly more we can do. Please share your ideas for new or improved features at the Application Insights User Voice page and for any questions visit the Application Insights Forum.