Power BI Streaming Datasets–An Alternative PowerShell Push Script

I attended the London Power BI Meetup last night. Guest speaker was Peter Myers On the topic of “Delivering Real-Time Power BI Dashboards With Power BI.” It was a great session.

Peter showed off three mechanisms for streaming data to a real time dashboard:

• The Power BI Rest API
• Azure Stream Analytics
• Streaming Datasets

We’ve done a fair bit at Adatis with the first two and whilst I was aware of the August 2016 feature, Streaming Datasets I’d never got round to looking at them in depth. Now, having seen them in action I wish I had – they are much quicker to set up than the other two options and require little to no development effort to get going – pretty good for demo scenarios or when you want to get something streaming pretty quickly at low cost.

You can find out more about Streaming Datasets and how to set them up here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-real-time-streaming/

If you create a new Streaming Dataset using ‘API’ as the source, Power BI will provide you with an example PowerShell script to send a single row of data into the dataset.  To extend this, I’ve hacked together a PowerShell script and that loops and sends ‘random’ data to the dataset. If you create a Streaming Dataset that matches the schema below, the PowerShell script further below will work immediately (subject to you replacing the endpoint information). If you create a different target streaming dataset you can easily modify the PowerShell script to continually push data into that dataset too.

I’ve shared this here, mainly as a repository for me, when I need it, but hopefully to benefit others too.

Streaming Dataset Schema

Alternative PowerShell Script

Just remember to copy the Power BI end point to the relevant location in the script.

You can find the end point (or Push URL) for the Dataset by navigating to the API Info area within the Streaming Dataset management page within the Power BI Service:

# Initialise Stream
$sleepDuration = 1  #PowerBI seldom updates realtime dashboards faster than once per second.
$eventsToSend = 500 #Change this to determine how many events are part of the stream
$endpoint = "[INSERT YOUR ENDPOINT HERE]"
    
# Initialise the Payload
$payload = @{EventDate = '' ; EventValue = 0; EventSource = ''}

# Initialise Event Sources
$eventSource = @('Source1', 'Source2', 'Source3')

# Iterate until $eventsToSend events have been sent
$index = 1 
do
{
    # Update payload
    $payload.EventDate = Get-Date -format s
    $source = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 3 
    $payload.EventSource = $eventSource[$source]
    $value = Get-Random -Minimum 0.00 -Maximum 101.00 
    $payload.EventValue = $value

    # Send the event
    Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri "$endpoint" -Body (ConvertTo-Json @($payload))

    # Report what has been sent
    "`nEvent {0}" -f $index
    $payload

    # Sleep for a second
    Start-Sleep $sleepDuration

    # Ready for the next iteration
    $index++

} While ($index -le $eventsToSend)

# Finished
"`n{0} Events Sent" -f $eventsToSend