How to Export Telemetry Data from Azure IoT Central into Power BI

[Shaurya]

The world that we live in is filled by an infinite number of sensors that continuously collect data of all sorts. Among several other categories of data, these devices read a huge of amount of telemetry data which can be analysed thoroughly and put to good use. Azure IoT Central is a ready to use platform that allows us to connect to multiple IoT Devices and monitor the data that we receive from them. It can be used by large enterprises to analyse data at scale. Alternatively, it can be used by individuals who are looking for a new report idea.

Once such idea is connecting our mobile phones to IoT Central and then analysing the telemetry data received from it by exporting it into Power BI. Here's a quick walkthrough of the steps that you'll need to perform to export the required data into a Power BI Dataset:

1. Start with https://apps.azureiotcentral.com/home
2. Build a custom app or use a template.
3. Add the Devices.
4. Check the data that is flowing in from the Android Device.
5. Go to Azure portal and create an Event Hub. Start by creating a Namespace first. Create an Event Hub within it.
6. Give access to the event hub for listening to messages and get the connection string.
7. Configure Destination in IoT Central by choosing the event hub you just created.
8. Configure the Export.
9. Check the status of the Export.
10. Create a Stream Job in Azure.
11. Set the Event Hub as input and a Power BI workspace as output for the job.
12. Modify the query to get data in the required format.
13. Start the Stream Job.
14. A dataset will automatically be created in the selected Power BI workspace.

Once you have the Dataset in your workspace, you can use that as a source in your Power BI Report and analyse your phone’s GPS coordinates, whether it was picked up by someone and moved and a lot more by looking at the telemetry data.