Probably one of the biggest pain in monitoring is to provide a dashboard displaying all information needed. There are many third party solutions available but also Microsoft offers plenty of ways to display monitoring information. One feature I like very much is to have Azure Log Analytic queries exported and displayed in PowerBI. In this post we are going one step further and will embed the Power BI dashboard in Grafana.
First we need to install Grafana and add the plugin for Azure Monitor. There is a well documented way how to do it in Azure, find the information here. After we have it up and running we can build pretty nice looking and flexible dashboards. My idea was to add Azure Log Analytics information to the Grafana dashboard showing Azure Monitor and Log Analytics data.
So let’s start! I have created a demo query in Log Analytics, which shows some CPU information….
…next we export the query to Power BI (M Query) in the Log Analytics portal…
…the query looks something like this…
…copy the entire query above and open Power BI Desktop > Get Data > Blank Query…
…oben Advanced Editior in Power BI Desktop…
…and paste the query….
…it will create a table with the data provisioned…
…build your report the way you need it and publish it to Power Bi service….
…if you haven’t already signed in, then you must probably provide the credentials to publish the report…
…under My Workspace we will find the CPUReport…
…go to File > Publish to Web
…this will start a wizard…
…warning you that the report will be publicly available…
…because this is just some test, I don’t care. In Power Bi we are able to give just our organization or specific people access to the reports. But this would be a different Power BI feature. After the report has been published successfully…
…we need to copy the Html <iframe> part, make sure you select the right size. Then navigate to Grafana dashboard and add a new text panel…
…edit the panel…
…and change the Mode to html and paste the previously copied <iframe> string…
…et voilà…
…our CPU performance dashboard will appear!
There are few things to know. First, if you don’t see the Publish to Web feature, make sure your administrator has enabled this option…
…the other thing is, that there are a limited amount of refresh intervals in Power BI. For my Power BI Pro license I could set 8 refresh intervals, which is probably not enough for a real time dashboard, but for some less dynamic data it might be a good fit…
I hope you like this approach as much as I do! Happy dashboarding 
!
