Real-time map of user location in Power BI

[Anonymous]

Hi.

So I have a table that lists the user id and their location. Records are appended everytime a user is added. Is it possible to have a map, a visual or third-party, that updates in near real-time every time a user is added to the table? I don't believe Power BI supports that, but is there a way to embed a third-party app into PBI and have it update on its own? It shouldn't be affected by other visuals; it will be a separate page with a map, focused on a particular country, that shows a user was added to a city in the country. 

I get data into Power BI from CosmosDB so maybe something that directly connects to Cosmos?

Any help would be great.

Thanks. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

One solution I found is when publishing the visuals I want to be updated real-time, I can pin the visual from the Power BI report onto a dashboard then it updates real-time. The live tiles do not support maps, only cards, bar and line charts, and guage charts, but it does work when pinning it.

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous If you are using DirectQuery you can use Change detection: Automatic page refresh in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler, unfortunately, CosmosDB does not support DirectQuery, only Import mode. 

I tried creating a streaming dataset, and using a custom function, I connect to the endpoint of the dataset and every time a user is added, a POST request with the payload is made to that endpoint. It worked but it looks like it's restricted to a few visuals (cards, bar charts, guage). I tried a map and it wasn't updating real-time. Not sure if I'm missng something. 

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous Hmm, yeah, streaming datasets are very limited in the visuals supported. And no DirectQuery. Hmm...

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler I found a few ways to work around CosmosDB having no DirectQuery; I could either use Synapse Link with where I then connect Power BI to a Synape instance that queries CosmosDB in real-time or use an HDInsight Spark instance to run Spark against CosmosDB in real-time and link to Power BI. But both of these require dedicated SQL (or SQL Serverless) and Spark pools which are fairly expensive and I would rather not go there.

It looks like my options are very limited here unfortunately.