Introduction
Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end-users to create their own reports and dashboards.
This integration enables you to push performance and alert data from Catchpoint to Power BI the moment its recorded. It relies on Catchpoint's two push APIs, Test Data Webhook and Alert Webhook. The Test Data Webhook API pushes all test performance metrics immediately after each test run. The Alert Webhook API pushes alert data the moment an alert is triggered. The data is sent via real-time streaming in Power BI, and we will be using the "push dataset" method. When the dataset is created, the Power BI service automatically creates a new database in the service to store the data. You can then generate reports based on the stored data.
Prerequisites
- Power BI account.
- Power BI desktop app. (To import reports)
Installation and Configuration
Power BI setup:
- In the Power BI service, select a workspace and select New.
- Select Streaming dataset and choose API as the source of your data and click Next.
- In the Name field, enter a name for the Dataset.
- For Values, add the value name and value type as shown below.
For Test Data webhook:
| Value Name | Value Type |
|---|---|
| Client Time | Number |
| TCP Connect Time | Number |
| Content Load Time | Number |
| DNS Resolution Time | Number |
| Document Complete Time | Number |
| DOM Content Load Time | Number |
| DOM Interactive Time | Number |
| DOM Load Time | Number |
| First Party Zone Impact | Number |
| Third Party Zone Impact | Number |
| Load Time | Number |
| Total Root Request Redirect Time | Number |
| Render Start Time | Number |
| Total Root Request Time | Number |
| Send Time | Number |
| TLS/SSL Time | Number |
| Time to Title | Number |
| Total Test Time | Number |
| Wait Time | Number |
| Webpage Response Time | Number |
| Wire Time | Number |
| Timestamp | DateTime |
| Test Name | Text |
| Node Name | Text |
| Error | Text |
| isError | Number |
| All other macros from the TEST DATA WEBHOOK MACROS article are also supported. |
For Alert Webhook:
| Value Name | Value Type |
|---|---|
| event_type | Text |
| description | Text |
| Test Name | Text |
| Test Id | Text |
| Test Url | Text |
| NodeName | Text |
| NodeClientAddress | Text |
| Timestamp | DateTime |
| Trigger Timestamp | DateTime |
| All other macros from the ALERT WEBHOOK MACRO article are also supported. |
- Enable Historical data analysis.
- Click Create. Capture the Push URL which will be needed during the Catchpoint setup.
Catchpoint Setup:
To get Catchpoint Test data into Power BI, log in into the Catchpoint Portal and go to Settings > API.
- In the Test Data Webhook and Alert Webhook sections, add the copied Push URL.
(Perform all of the following steps in both sections) - Set status to Active.
- Select Template.
- Click Add New from the drop-down.
- Enter a Name.
- Select JSON under format.
- Paste template content from the attached
.txtfiles. (Testdata-Webhook-Template.txtfor Test Data Webhook andAlert-Webhook-Template.txtfor Alert Webhook.) - Click Save.
Note: For each test that you want to send data to Power BI, you must enable the Test Data Webhook option under Test Properties > More Settings.
Implementation
Importing Reports:
- In Power BI Desktop, in the navigator pane, click Open report and select Browse reports.
- Select the attached .PBIX extension file.
- A warning message will pop up showing “Unable to connect”. Select Edit.
- Select a dataset that was created in the previous steps.
Result
The Catchpoint - Overview dashboard is your central location for the Catchpoint tests in Power BI, and includes widgets that display recent Alerts and Catchpoint test data.
The Alerts page allows you to view the history of all the alerts reported by Catchpoint.
To create your own visualization or reports.
- In your Power BI workspace, select New and choose Report.
- Select Pick a published dataset and choose the created dataset.
- This should create an empty report. You can choose different visualizations fields to customize the report.
Note: This article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-dashboard-pin-tile-from-report explains how to pin a tile to a Power BI dashboard from a report.