Power BI for BlueDolphin Quickstart

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 numbers 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 template 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).

The template consists of three dashboards (pages).

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.

Please note, the completeness is zero when there is nothing in BlueDolphin’s questionnaires that should count toward the completeness of an object definition.

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 amount 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.

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

How to use the template

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 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.

In the future I’ll create more articles about how to extend this template with the properties of your environment (now it only consist of objects and their relationships) and how to create your own dashboards with this data model. But for now I hope this will help to give some insights about your organization’s BlueDolphin usage.

If you want to receive the template, leave your details in the form below:

Any comments or suggestions regarding our instructions when working with OData are welcome!