Integrating Power BI Report into Customer Dashboard

[MannyJ]

Hi All.

I am not an expert with Power BI but I understand that we can use APIs and SQL queries to connect our models to databases. 

I am  systems administrator for a utilities company and we want our customer to have a better view of their consumption and cost data. We currently have a customer portal where customers can view their data but we need to make this visually better and more dynamic/interactive.

I am currently building an aggregation dashboard on Power BI using consumption data that I exported from our system. Once the dashboard is built, I would like to connect this to our Database in AWS and then have this displayed on each customer's dashboard on the online portal. 

I would like to find out how it would be possible that the database I connect my model to would filter down the data according to which customer is viewing their data on their portal without having to create a million different reports. This might be a dumb and obvious question, but I would just like to get an expert opinion before I proceed.

Thanks!

@dm-p @Sahir_Maharaj @lbendlin 

[Adamboer · Accepted solution]

Your question is not dumb at all! It's a great question and it's always better to get an expert opinion before proceeding with a project.

To answer your question, you can achieve this by using Power BI's Row-Level Security (RLS) feature. RLS allows you to restrict data access based on user roles or permissions.

In your case, you could create a table in your database that maps each customer's login information to their unique identifier in your consumption data. Then, you can set up RLS in Power BI so that when a customer logs in to the portal, their unique identifier is passed through to the dashboard, which in turn filters the consumption data to only show data for that customer.

To implement this, you would need to set up a connection between your Power BI dashboard and your AWS database, and then set up the RLS rules in Power BI. You can find detailed instructions on how to set up RLS in Power BI on Microsoft's website.

Once you have set up RLS, you can publish the dashboard to the Power BI service and embed it into your customer portal so that customers can view their data in an interactive and dynamic way.

[MannyJ]

Thank you so much! This was so useful👌