Monitor Real time Data with Power BI Dashboards. Ive hear this a lot in my presentations that Does Power BI support real time data, And I answer yes. In fact this feature was available long time ago with Azure Stream Analytics and Power BI, however recently some new changes happened in this area which allows Power BI dashboards to monitor real time data changes on the dashboard from a data coming from API, and also Pub. Nub. In this post Ill show you how easy is to create a dashboard that shows real time data coming from API. If you want to learn more about Power BI, read Power BI online book from Rookie to Rock Star. Real Time Data, Instant Monitoring. One of the key features of monitoring tools is the ability to monitor the real time data instantly when the data refreshes. That means as a user you dont need to click on refresh button to see the latest data. This single key feature brings heaps of value to Power BI as a monitoring tool. This ability isnt new, in fact Amir Net. Z showed an awesome demo of an Io. T device working with Azure Stream Analytics and Power BI as a real time monitoring. So what is new is that we can now have this feature in the new generation of Power BI with a dashboard tile connected to streaming data. Streaming data sets can be now either API, Azure Stream Analytics coming soon, and Pub. Nub. More streaming services will come very soon I believe. DC895FkV9Vo/Vcc_DqAdkJI/AAAAAAAAAwI/SIb_7AwEnKg/s1600/Screenshot_10.jpg' alt='Darwin Streaming Server Installation Windows 10' title='Darwin Streaming Server Installation Windows 10' />In this post I want to show you only streaming data through API, and showing that in a dashboard tile in Power BI. This single streaming option by itself opens many gates to Power BI as a real time data monitoring tool. So lets start. Prerequisite. For this example I will be using Microsoft sample. Dr. Leila Etaati is Principal Data Scientist, BI Consultant, and Speaker. She has over 10 years experience working with databases and software systems. Meetup Data Source for Power BI Tips for Mobile Friendly Report Development with Power BI Step by Step Walk through OnPremises Live SQL Server Connection with Power. Now to get you server working the way you want it, you must customize some code, allowing for certain file types and directories. To do so, run this command in the. NET application named PBIReal. Time. Streaming. You can download it from here. You need Visual Studio Not SSDT for running this example solution. Real time Data Set. Start with logging in to Power BI service, create a new dashboard or open an existing dashboard. And create a New Tile. In the New Tile pane you now can see an option to add a tile for real time data. Select this option and click Next. So go to Manage Data to create one Now you are in streaming data sets window. Add Streaming Dataset option on top right hand side. Create Sample Streaming Data Set. As Ive mentioned before at the time of writing this post only these three options for streaming data is available API, Azure Stream Analytics, and Pub. Nub which is a data streaming service. Because for this example we are using API as a streaming option, choose API and continue. Now create a new data set with a name such as my. Sample. RTDS or any other names you like. You have to create two columns as below ts column with Date. Time data typevalue column with Number data type. These are columns that will be created and passed through a. NET application through Power BI API to this data set. Now click on create. Sample Excel Data Files. This will create the data set with a Push URL that can be used in the application through API. URL. We will be using that in the application next step. Sample Streaming Data API Application. As I mentioned before, download the sample project. PBIReal. Time. Streaming. And open the PBIReal. Time. Streaming solution in Visual Studio. This project creates a data set including a datetime value and a numeric value and will pass that through Power BI API which will be discussed later in another post to Power BI service. Open Program. cs file and in line 3. Time. Push. URL to the URL which weve copied from above step. Run the application with pressing F5, or right click on project, Debug, Start New instance. The application will generate a data point in each second and send it through API. Create Dashboard Tile. Now, lets create the dashboard tile for this streaming data set. Follow the steps and choose the my. Sample. RTDS as the data streaming source for the tile. There are number of chartsvisualizations that you can use with streaming data set. Choose Card for the first example. Add another dashboard tile for the same data set, and set this to be a Line chart with ts field in Axis, and value field in Values. After adding each chart you will immediately see the real time dashboard working and changes every second because streaming data from application updates every second API Data Can Be Anything. The sample used here had only one datetime field and a value field. However you can create your own data stream from any event, notifications, or data set that you want to be monitored real time. With a simple application the stream of data can be generated. Or it can come from Azure Stream Analytics or Pub. Nub. Dont limit your options, think about where you can use this feature to solve a real time monitoring challenge. Save. Reza Rad is an Author, Trainer, Speaker and DWBI Consultant. He has a BSc in Computer engineering he has more than 1. Microsoft technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Data Platform for seven continues years from 2. Microsoft BI. He is author of some SQL Server and BI books, and also Power BI online book from Rookie to Rock Star.