Automic Stats and PowerBI

[Tina Hart]

Hello,

We are currently  moving towards PowerBI for our standard reporting within IT.  One thing that has been requested was to gather information from Automic so we can provide high level reports on items such as executions per day/month/year, number of failures/successes, etc....

I know that we could technically grant out access to the reporting too in Automic, however, this is not an approach we want to take.  

Just wondering if anyone else has done this in the past and if there are any suggestions on how to get this done.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Tina

[Tina Hart]

Good Morning,

Just wondering if anyone has had to accomplish this at all.  We are mainly contemplating if we should connect straight to our Oracle DB for Automic and pull the data and build the reports that way.  Or if we are going to use the Automid reporting tool to pull the required data and then use this in PowerBI.

The thought is that if we are pulling direct from Oracle DB from PowerBI, we could impact app performance.

If anyone has done anything similar with other reporting tools even, please let me know.

Thanks!!

[Pete Wirfs]

Our database query that searches the AE database for instances of hard coded literals throughout the system is so useful for general research, that I had it set up in our home-grown reporting tool so that all of the developers can run the query.   It hits the database with a read-only service account, and they can toggle it between PROD and non-PROD.

 

As you said, the business concern is "what if" it hurts AE performance by adding unexpected load to the database.  Yes all database queries cause load, and therefore run that risk.  Because this risk is always greater than zero, all product vendors will advise you to not do it.  In our case, I made the decision to accept the risk.  I've been a SQL developer for over 20 years and sometimes just use my gut feeling.  When I'm really concerned, I'll also run database explains against my SQL so I can evaluate its efficiency and consider tuning it for performance (serious tuning usually requires upgrades to the database itself, and I'll never do that to a vendor database!)  But in this case I have never seen the query take more than a couple of seconds wall time to run, so I don't have any performance concerns.

 

I also run a monthly summary of task/workflow/aborts counts and throw them up in an Excel chart for management for trend analysis.  I run this query from my developer SQL tool. 

[Pete Wirfs]

I'm also lucky enough to have an excellent DBA staff watching how things perform for me.  They run automated database maintenance processes every weekend to keep it in tip top shape.

[Tina Hart]

Thanks for the feedback on this one!!!  We work closely with the DBAs, so i'll look at this option as well.

[Cesar Garcia-Hernandez]

Have you thought of pulling data from SharePoint lists for your PowerBI reporting, if you're also on SharePoint.  I haven't pulled directly from AppWorx to PowerBI, but have pulled data from a database outside of SharePoint to a SharePoint list using Microsoft API's.  I then built PowerBI dashboards/reports using data from that list.  I believe AppWorx had additional functionality to use REST APIs, although this could also be done using a Java program using the awjava program type in AppWorx.

 

Cesar

[Tina Hart]

That's a neat idea actually.  We were considering a place to store the data in the cloud and we have access to SharePoint which is an option that we might test out.