There are two things that I’m a sucker for when it comes to technology: a great data visualisation (often achieved via PowerBI) and a seamless cloud deployment and management of device (usually by Intune).
This morning I read a tweet from Jannik Reinhard that managed to combine the two of them in a single blog post, so naturally I wanted to read more! As always, I try to credit the original source when I’m inspired to write my own blog based on their content, so check out his tweet here:
And you can read his full post here: Build PowerBi Dashboard based on Intune Data Warehouse – Modern Device Management (jannikreinhard.com)
The genius behind this blog post is the beta feature called the Microsoft Intune Data Warehouse – if you’re wondering what this is, then the documentation states:
The Intune Data Warehouse samples data daily to provide a historical view of your continually changing environment of mobile devices. The view is composed of related entities in time.
Data Warehouse data model – Microsoft Intune | Microsoft Docs
The warehouse exposes data in the following high-level areas:
- App protection enabled apps and usage
- Enrolled devices, properties, and inventory
- Apps and software inventory
- Device configuration and compliance policies
These are all super helpful things to know and, whilst Intune provides it’s own reports, sometimes you want to drill a little deeper into the data or present it in a way that makes more sense for your own preferences for troubleshooting.
Getting Set Up For Custom Reporting With PowerBI
Jannik’s blog does a great job stepping you through the steps to get set up – honestly, this is only going to take you 2-3minutes. I could screenshot it, but he’s already done this here
The key is to select ‘Get Data’ in PowerBI App and then search for “Intune” in the search box and you should see the connector:
The other super helpful contribution from Jannik is the Intune Dashboard template he’s build and shared on GitHub – you can download it from here. It comes pre-populated with his data, but a simple click of “Refresh” in PowerBI and you’ll be seeing your own data reporting from your tenant.
Sample Data From My Intune Console
Within 5 minutes of reading the original blog I had my own data being visualised and here are the three main views:
Apps
Devices
Config Profiles
One thing that confused me at first was the three buttons at the bottom of the report for App / Device / ConfigProfiles – you can see these highlighted above. I initially thought you could click on these to select each report, but you actually still need to click the tab at the bottom of PowerBI for each report – see below:
Correcting the above – Jannik helpfully reached out on Twitter and reminded me that when using PowerBI Desktop you need to select ctrl+click to trigger buttons in a report. Once you publish the dashboard to www.powerbi.com then you no longer need to hold ctrl+click, but simply click on the button and it will change views. Thanks for the reminder Jannik!
Other than that, the reports work beautifully and the data can be refreshed daily to see the latest snapshot. With a little tweaking of the PowerBI report you can call out out whatever data is most important to you – have fun!
Hi Sam,
I am not sure If I am being special but when I go to open the power bi report you attached I seem to get a grey screen… I suspect this isn’t normal behavior, have you seen this before?
Curious how you are dealing with the duplicates