BlueDolphin stores the information about objects and their relationships. Because of these relationships, creating a table report is not easy. For example, a business function is served by three processes, with each of these processes using two applications. If I create a table report with Excel, I’ll get 1x3x2 = 6 rows of data for a single business function. When I also want to show the nodes (servers) those applications are running on and/or the number of actors involved, the number multiplies by the number of objects. And this can expand to a point where the report loses its value.

This is where BI becomes really useful. In BlueDolphin itself, we have a BI tool, but it has its limitations. For example, we only go one relationship deep. When you really want to deep dive into the information BlueDolphin has to offer, you need to use our OData feed and connect it to a BI tool of your choice.

BI itself can be challenging as well, so we’ve come up with a dashboard templates for Power BI that can be used by all of our customers. Even when you don’t own Power BI licenses, I believe you can still download the Power BI Desktop for personal use (no guarantees here, as Microsoft policies can change).

To help you get started quickly, this Quickstart includes two standardized Power BI dashboards — the Basic Dashboard and the Governance Dashboard — that you can connect to your BlueDolphin tenant using the OData feed.

Before connecting the dashboards in Power BI Desktop, you must generate an OData feed API key for your tenant.

The Basic Dashboard provides a quick start for setting up Power BI using the standard BlueDolphin data model. It delivers ready-to-use governance reports and gives customers clear insight into tenant activities, created objects, and established relationships.

You can find the BASIC - Dashboard, v3.0.pbit version of the PowerBI reports/templates in the attached zip file.

The template consists of four dashboards (pages).

Here you will find what kind of objects are created, by who and when and how complete the objects are filled in.

The first dashboard shows an overview of the number of objects per definition, completeness per definition, who created the objects, and when the objects were created.

This dashboard can be filtered by clicking on the information you want to zoom in on. For example, the dashboard below shows the result when clicking on Node in Objectdefinition count.

The second dashboard is a cross-table that shows the number of relationships from the chosen object definition to all related object definitions. By clicking on a number, the relationship details will filter by a specific object definition combination.

You can change the definition with the filter in the top of the page.

The last dashboard is a simple table list that can be filtered on the object definition, the creator of the object, and a specific timeframe to get more details about specific objects.

Here you will find an overview of all the double relations.

Download the template at the bottom of this article and install the Power BI desktop.

Start Power BI and click Open other reports (or from File > Open report) and browse for the Power BI template file.

Because you are opening a template file and not a report, make sure you change the file you are looking for to "Power BI template files (*.pbit)".

The template doesn’t contain any data and needs to be connected to the OData feed of your tenant. From the ribbon, click Transform data and then Data source settings.

This shows the datasource settings for the tenantname.odata.bluedolphin.app. By clicking Change source..., this URL can be customized for your organization. Here I changed it to my tenant's name.

To be able to use the More columns functionality, select Advanced, specify the URL, and check the box Include open type columns.

Go to Edit Permissions... and enter the basic authentication here. The username can be found in your tenant in Admin > System > General. The username is the Database name.

The password can be found in Admin > Identity and access > Public API keys. The password is the valid API key with the scope OData feed.

Use the API key with the OData feed scope that you have created earlier, or create a new key. For more information on how to create a key, see here.

Save the new username and password and close the data source settings.

Power BI registers the change in the data source settings and gives a warning about this. Click Apply changes to load the OData information from your environment. Depending on the amount of data, this can take some time.