One of the cool features in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operation are Analytical workspaces which enables Dynamics to display PowerBI workspaces inside of the Dynamics UI which also means that you are able to use the included limited PowerBI license that comes with D365fO
To get this working you can either deploy the includes report packages which are downloadable from LCS or you can create your own and upload them to LCS. There is however some infrastructure required to get this up and running because the report get their data from aggregetad measurements, which you are required to create.
The measurements are syncronized to the AxDW database and the report uses Direct Query to read the data. Since the report reads its data from the AxDW database it does not have the ferformance implications that OData has.
The process for setting this up in a Tier-2 and up environment is pretty straight forward since these all include the specific service for hosting the PowerBI report but in Tier-1 (OneBox) this service is not present and this means that we will have to do a slight workaround.
First we have to create an Azure Service for hosting the report, you will find the detils in this link
The next step is to copy the AxDW database from the environment to Azure SQL. You find the information here and here.
And the last part is to reconfigure the OneBox environment to use the Azure SQL hosted entity store instead of the internal
I only had one minor issue diring the setup… the AxDW admin user was not able to log in to the AxDW database in Azure SQL resulting in this message:
I resolved it by deleting and recreating the user :
CREATE LOGIN [axdwadmin] WITH PASSWORD = 'axdwpassword' CREATE USER [axdwadmin] FOR LOGIN [axdwadmin] WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo; ALTER ROLE db_datareader ADD MEMBER [axdwadmin]; ALTER ROLE db_datawriter ADD MEMBER [axdwadmin]; ALTER ROLE db_owner ADD MEMBER [axdwadmin];
Links:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dynamicsaxbi/2017/07/29/deploy-azure-sql-server-for-hosting-entity-store-database/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dynamicsaxbi/2017/07/29/publish-the-entity-store-database-on-azure-sql-server/
You have explained in great the detail the on how to set up Power bi embedded and analytical work spaces in dynamics 365 for finance and operations in a one box environment. This comment will definitely help millions to get through with power bi. You have explained the procedures in such a simple and easy format. Thank you for this wonderful post.