We are evaluating creating live KPI dashboards that can display on shop floor television displays for our various departments. I assume Data Discovery is the easiest way to do this? How do you connect that to a television without taking up a Kinetic user seat.
Thank you!
I just hired a marketing company to do mine in PowerBI. (read->I am lazy and they gave me a checkbook.) I’ll let you know how that goes.
If you have solid SQL resources on hand, a BAQ and REST will feed anything that accepts JSON via HTTP as a data source. REST queries only consume a license for the duration of the connection, so keep those queries performant and if you reliably have at least a license spot or two available or inactive you’ll be fine.
If SQL skills aren’t in the cards, then something like Data Discovery might be easier for someone to jump in and do. Or if you’re outsourcing the work then a decent contractor should inform good decisions about what to work with.
Anyway, in my own case I’ve done this with Power BI retrieving BAQ results over REST because it’s what we have, not for any other reason. Whatever the presentation choice is, the BAQ side might be 10-20% of the work, building the presentation 80-90%, and the actual connection is within a rounding error of 0%.
I’m with Kevin. PowerBI Licenses are cheap, and a BAQ as the datasource can make great dashboards with a competent PowerBI designer.
One occasional caveat with Power BI - When a report is published to a workspace so others can view it from Teams or their phone or whatever, you get up to 8 scheduled refreshes per day on the published dataset. Not a big deal for most things, but for things that someone might want to be super current all the time (like shop floor KPI’s, depending on the shop floor) that can be an issue.
I’ve since learned that is not me.
As mentioned, BAQs and REST open just about anything you can imagine. We have 9 large TVs on our shop floor and I pull a mix of rest and direct SQL queries (replica server) and feed it into some simple PHP pages. Point a browser at it and let it run.
In our case the information needs to be simple and not very dense so it can be read from 20+ feet away
I’ve only worked with PowerBI with SQL server as the datasource - where you can use a ‘direct query’ instead of ‘Import’, which gives you live data, and then set a report refresh time to every few seconds. Of course you need to keep the query size reasonable.
Is this an option for the method your using? In interested in learning all I can around this - at the moment we have a seperate database with views based on the Kinetic database and base our datasets on this, but at some stage we want to move to BAQ’s/REST in preparation of moving to Kinetic cloud (maybe one day).
I need to qualify my comment - that doesn’t necessarily apply if you’re hosting Power BI on premises. If you’re doing on premises PBI and continue, I don’t think you’d see a change.
We’re working with the 365 related service. Publishing to cloud PBI services adds some limitations. It does pop reporting into everyone’s Teams and whatever, which is nice.