Building a Business Intelligence dashboard with a Raspberry Pi and Power BI

This week we’re exploring the capabilities of Microsoft Power BI (an Office 365 add-on) to give us a clear picture of our daily performance.

Power BI allows you to connect multiple data sources from a wide range of on-premise and cloud services and view the live data in a clean dashboard. You can view and share dashboards from the browser, the windows app, or the mobile apps for iOS, Android or Windows Phone. In our case, we wanted the screen in our office to focus on a couple of things: the performance of our support team, and our website statistics.

We’re tracking the support team performance because it’s the core of our business, and the website performance because we’re focusing on delivering more useful content and would like to see how it’s received.

The data we need to track these metrics is stored in external silos – Zendesk and Google Analytics. Luckily, Power BI makes it easy to connect these data sources to a single dashboard.

Here’s a video of it starting up, and a photo of the finished dashboard:

This setup uses a Raspberry Pi connected to an Azure Virtual Machine running Power BI through the browser.

We’ll be adding new features in the next few weeks  involving additional Raspberry Pis, some connected sensors and Azure SQL. Stay tuned!