Summary
Power BI is an application that can only be used on a Windows OS. It has a wide ranging capability to import data and create reports. Since this is available enterprise wide in CBIIT, we are investigating it's use for created a possible alternative to an active webpage. We have seen through tutorials and videos that it can certainly connect to a REST service and use that service as source of data. Even though it does offer the option of being updated on a regular basis, it has a fairly complex configuration pipeline that would still need some sort of business rules built into its spreadsheet like macros to get the kind of report we are looking to replicate for annual usage reports of websites. We don't seem to have any guarantee of security when connecting to an Elasticsearch instance as a REST endpoint. Potential user authentication is also uncertain.
Decision Points
- Windows Users Only
- Authentication/Encryption of REST from Elasticsearch
- Output for report creating user still has to be processed by business rules
- Learning curve and time to end use still doesn't necessarily create the dynamic user interface
- Estimated time looks to be about the same as implementation of report producing application with no platform restrictions for OS
- A web application could produce preprocessed spread sheet data that could either directly generate a chart or be pulled into Power BI for the same purpose
Resources
https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Power-Query/Using-a-REST-API-as-a-data-source/td-p/50400
https://zappysys.com/blog/howto-import-json-rest-api-power-bi/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-data
