Power BI & Azure DevOps

Given the immense amount of data that is currently managed within companies, data management and analysis have become both a necessity and a challenge. There are multiple tools available for visualizing these data, connecting to various data sources, and performing data modeling, segmentation, filtering, and creation of custom measures. Furthermore, based on our experience, it is no longer merely necessary to display data with quality in official reports or with large consumer groups, it is also crucial to ensure a reliable and consistent delivery of reports.

The challenge we faced was to create a solution that would allow for the management of the lifecycle of corporate reports created in Power BI, as well as the backing up of each report that reached the production environment.

For lifecycle management, Power BI introduces within its tool stack, under the Premium capacity, the Deployment Pipelines that allow us to:

• Associate workspaces with the concept of development environments (Development, Test, Production, etc.).
• Have different credentials for our data sources in each environment, or use different gateways.
• Manage the transition between environments, either manually or in an automated way.
• Detect the differences in objects between environments.
• Centrally control all the environments in a single panel and all their capabilities.

The solution we have designed includes the use of Power BI functionality for the development of pipelines with three environments: Development, Test, and Production. It also utilizes Azure DevOps for creating a pipeline that promotes Power BI reports from the Development to Test or from Test to Production environment and stores the different versions of the productive report in another workspace.