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Power BI for quick and affordable insights
Updated November 21, 2018

Power BI for quick and affordable insights

Viktor Mulac | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

We have designed an additional layer over Atlassian JIRA and enhanced significantly analytical drilldowns in a SW development projects, software maintenance and end user support. We have also developed custom API to JIRA to efficiently gather JIRA data and process and present them in Power BI dashboards. The management was first skeptical, since the JIRA service desk team already had some reports done in the native JIRA environment. However we have convinced them that the connection of Power BI and JIRA logs makes a sense. Today it is used to visualize flow, detect anomalies (too many cycles, overused programmer resources etc.) in a perfect visual form.
  • Quick and easy dashboard deployment
  • Easy integration to existing system (both API and raw data imports were used)
  • Mobile platform (tablets) support
  • I can not think of any. Until now, all works well!
We use in the overlapping areas as data preparation and advanced analytics, monitoring and allerting also other tools as IBM ThingWorx (for the IoT tasks), Splunk (production and banking), SAP Lumira and SAP HANA, SAP Designer (production) and also specialized process mining tools as e.g. Minit (Gradient). Power BI can be used to present data gathered and analyzed in the other big data analytical systems, since the client already owns it and some of the analytical tools offer way too much complexity, that we can shield with prepared Power BI management reports.
I would recommend this solution (and we have started to use it) since it is cheap. Even our developer started to use it in a cloud version before the project officially started. For a few bucks per month. So there is a really low entry barrier. Basically it will fit in a situation where you need a short development time. Not very well suited for big data analysis in production system though.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
9.0
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
9
9.5
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
Not Rated
10.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
Not Rated
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
10
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
10.0
REST API
10
Javascript API
10
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Using Microsoft Power BI

3 - Data scientist and IT analyst
Business consultant / architect
2 - We work in a small team, enlarged when needed by e.g. a programmer, integration specialist, UX designer etc. But the core team is 2-3 people.
  • Sales presentation - to convince the client about the value of data they have and do not use to get insigt. It is easy to create a model of a future reporting / allerting / monitoring system on prepared data and present all potential features on real life data (e.g. anonymized, lightly changed, to protect data privacy)
  • Visualize flows, be it human processes or e.g. movement of product among waypoints in a factory paintshop
  • Drill down analysis - by clicking the active report element, go to detailed statistics or other more detailed graph. Very useful and interactive
  • Simulation of real-time working allerting solution options
  • A custom programmed Power BI flow discovery application, replacing funcitons of specialized process mining tools.

Evaluating Microsoft Power BI and Competitors

Yes - Our client evaluated several platforms: the company wanted to decide among three platforms, Tableau (not very good for the specified purpose), SAS Visual Analytics on Viya and MS Power BI. Finally the decision was made to go for implement MS Power BI reporting platform powered by PowerBI Server (paid), within the Microsoft Office 365
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Analyst Reports
Part of the selection process was to simulate future reports for the whole branch network on each platform, old SAS VA, Tableau and MS Power BI.
The decision was clearly in favor of Power BI. A significant fact is an extensive experience of about tens of analysts wit MS Excel, which in the basic mode is very similar, of course I am not talking about DAX scripting, which requires more advanced training.
I would probably go the same way, the price was not the most decsive point, the task was to get a "familiar, easy to use product" that was fulfilled by MS Power BI. Unfortunately the SAS on Viya was not available as a trial solution, so a full comparison was not possible. Also, the MS Power BI comprises nowadays manyu addons and the user community is wide, unlike for SAS.