Azure
Last updated
Last updated
PowerBI Robots supports delivery to Azure. To use it, make sure you:
Have an Azure Blob Storage set up in your organization’s Azure Portal.
If you don’t have administrator privileges, please contact your organization’s IT administrator to do it since this is a very technical step requiring those privileges.
Setting up the PowerBI Robots desktop agent
Go to your organization’s Azure Portal and select Storage Accounts.
Select the storage account of your choice, click on Access Keys and copy on the connection strings.
Next, open the PowerBI Robots desktop agent (make sure you have the latest version installed).
Go to the Providers tab. Select the Azure Storage subtab, and paste the Azure Blob Storage connection string here.
Click save and close the PowerBI Robots desktop agent.
Setting up a Playlist for Azure Deploy
Open the PowerBI Robots web agent and create a new playlist. There will be a new option in the General tab under Deliver To: Azure.
Once you select this option, name your playlist, select its output format (image, PDF of Excel file) and set its recurrence.
Optional: You can make use of tokens, so it’s easier to track changes on a report over time. Tokens are also useful if you want to maintain these track changes and don’t delete previous versions.
The following example uses the Long Date token:
The use of the previous token translates to the following file format:
You can choose between the following range of tokens:
You can also add a Timestamp to your visuals, an option that you can find under Rendering settings.
Once you are done with the General settings, proceed to the Recipients tab.
To start creating a new container in your Azure Blob Storage, press the blue plus (+) sign.
This adds two new inputs: container name and folder path. Deploying to Azure saves your reports and dashboards inside a container and folders. You can define a path by using (\) or (/). This will create a new folder inside the previous one (ex: folder1/folder2/folder3)
Tokens are also available when creating your folder path
According to the example above, in the Azure Blob Storage, a Year folder will be created inside our container, and a month folder will be created inside our Year folder:
Next, proceed to the Visuals tab and select your visuals as usual (Check the 'How to use' tab for more info)
Note: If your playlist is outputting more than one visual (i.e., if the output format is images, multiple PDFs, or multiple Excel files), their title in the Visuals tab will override the one you set in the General tab. Make sure you change the title of each visual to organize them accordingly and, once again, use the available tokens to make the information easier to navigate in the future.
To access the files created by your PowerBI Robots playlist, return to the Azure Portal. On the side menu, go to your Storage Accounts, select the blob storage you previously created and click Storage Explorer. Collapse 'BLOB CONTAINERS' to see a list of the containers you created in PowerBI Robots.
Click one of these containers. The files created by your playlist will be shown there.
