Microsoft Power BI Connector from Dynatrace allows enhanced, data-driven decision making

Organizations increasingly rely on advanced analytics and data visualization solutions to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition. Dynatrace and Microsoft Power BI are among the most powerful platforms in the market to address these needs.

While Dynatrace and Microsoft Power BI offer significant value on their own, connecting the two can exponentially enhance the insights they unlock. Here, we explore how companies that use both platforms can benefit from the Microsoft Power BI Connector from Dynatrace.

The impact of Dynatrace and Microsoft Power BI

Dynatrace is the leading AI-powered observability and security platform. It helps organizations understand their business like never before through AI-driven analytics and automation and offers deep insights into IT and business health based on real-time data from logs, metrics, traces, and business events.

Microsoft Power BI provides interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an intuitive user interface. It allows end users to create reports and dashboards easily. It integrates seamlessly with various data sources and offers robust manipulation and visualization features to help organizations accelerate the time to value from business analytics.

The synergy of integration

Combining the analytical prowess of Microsoft Power BI with the comprehensive observability data in Dynatrace creates a powerful synergy. Key benefits of this integration include the following:

Complementary data visualizations

Dynatrace captures a wealth of data across critical IT and business metrics like application and infrastructure performance, user experience, security, and business health. Additionally, Dynatrace offers a rich and expanding set of dashboards, charting, and analytics capabilities.

With the Microsoft Power BI Connector, joint customers can now transform complex Dynatrace data sets into intuitive, interactive visualizations within Microsoft Power BI to maximize the value of their investment in both solutions.

Integrated reporting

Microsoft Power BI analysts often model information from various sources, including extra categorical dimensional data from local databases or spreadsheets. Now, joint customers can bring rich data from Dynatrace into Microsoft Power BI and model it alongside other data sources that would typically not go into an observability platform.

Microsoft Power BI analysts are accustomed to creating powerful reports from a variety of databases and Microsoft Excel sources. Now, joint customers can bring observability-driven insights directly into Microsoft Power BI and combine them with external data sources to provide an even richer view. The seamless integration offered by the Microsoft Power BI Connector allows analysts to delve deeper into the effects of software and infrastructure performance, application security, and user experience metrics on business outcomes. This, in turn, helps them to maximize the value of their investments in business intelligence and analytics.

Improved collaboration

The Microsoft Power BI Connector makes it easy for teams to collaborate on projects that are informed by integrated Dynatrace business and observability data. Therefore, teams across different business and technology departments can access and analyze the same performance metrics in a single platform, fostering a collaborative approach to problem-solving and decision-making. This shared understanding is crucial for aligning objectives and strategies across the organization, with cross-functional teams leveraging enormous amounts of observability data and business intelligence to achieve better outcomes.

Additionally, Dynatrace data observability capabilities can verify the quality and security of data, giving analysts a rich, trustworthy, and secure source of truth they can rely on for reporting.

How to implement the Connector

The Microsoft Power BI Connector allows Power BI to access data stored in Dynatrace Grail™ data lakehouse. Implementation follows a standard set of steps:

• Define the Dynatrace environment to be used as a data source. The environment's user information will be authenticated, and Dynatrace Grail permissions will be verified.
• Run Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) queries to load data into Microsoft Power BI, or further transform the data using the Power Query editor.

Dynatrace uses the integration for cost analysis

The Dynatrace FinOps team uses the Microsoft Power BI Connector to derive deeper insights into our cloud costs, making it easier to report this information to senior-level executives.

The Dynatrace platform ingests details of our cloud provider costs along with infrastructure and application consumption data. The FinOps team combines this with dynamic categorical information stored in Microsoft Excel and relational models within a Microsoft Power BI model. Dynatrace provides all the necessary backend and scale, while Microsoft Power BI provides the reporting, and Microsoft Excel provides the required ingestion, ultimately providing the best of both worlds.

Apply data-driven decision making for success

The Microsoft Power BI Connector offers a significant advantage to organizations that prioritize data-driven decision-making. By leveraging the strengths of both platforms, analysts can achieve a comprehensive, real-time understanding of their IT ecosystem, enabling them to optimize performance, improve user experience, and drive strategic initiatives.

For those already using Dynatrace and Microsoft Power BI, the Connector is a logical step toward maximizing the value of their data assets and enhancing their operational efficiency.

Watch this Dynatrace Observability lab video for a closer look at the Microsoft Power BI Connector in action.