Understand IoT Hub and storage options in Microssoft to use PowerBI

Question

I am connecting my sensor to an IoT gateway device and plan to stream this data into PowerBI using MS Stram analytics. The data will be in JSON format and I am using MS IoT hub.

I am new to this process and want to know if and how I can store my data. Will I need to buy storage from Microsoft (say Blob storage) and what limitations will that have? I read somewhere that I will not be able to use certain features in PowerBI if I am streaming real-time data via MS Stream Analytics (modeling or slicing features in PowerBI), is that true?

Can anyone guide me through this? Any resources or previously achieved projects will help. If MS support can schedule a short meeting, that would be extraordinary.

Answer 1

Hello @Amandeep Singh Virdi ,

Yes, it's possible to use the combination of IoTHub -> Stream Analytics -> PowerBI to represent incoming telemetry in charts, pivots, etc.

Just check out this tutorial on representing data.

If you connect PowerBI directly to Azure Stream Analytics, the data is kept within PowerBI with a certain retention time:

defaultRetentionPolicy: BasicFIFO - Data is FIFO, with a maximum of 200,000 rows.
defaultMode: hybrid - The dataset supports both streaming tiles (also known as push) and traditional report-based visuals. For the push content, the data is continuously updated from the stream analytics job in this case, with no need to schedule refresh from the Power BI side.

You can also choose to 'bring your own datasource' eg. Sql Azure.

The path will look like IoTHub -> Stream Analytics -> Sql Azure -> PowerBI

I'm not a PowerBI expert. I used it a few years ago. At that time, it seemed the PowerBI web tooling was limited compared with the desktop tooling. Though, it should be possible to publish desktop reports into the online version.