Power BI is a powerful tool which allows you to easily build interactive data visualizations from almost any type of data you have. This Microsoft tool can be used as a desktop app, mobile app or directly online. It is free of use if you don’t have a lot of data and quite cheap if you need more. I am not a business intelligence developer and I don’t have a BI background at all still I found Power BI a great way to quickly build my dashboards.
As an agile developer and scrum master I wanted to capitalize on the data we have from TFS and make even more complete dashboard than the ones built in. I tried online with my msdn linked Team Services account and It was so mind blowing that I immediately wanted to use it at work. BUT – there is a but – Power BI does not have a TFS connector for on premises TFS servers. And it’s clearly not in the top of their backlog.
So here is the trick to connect Power BI to your on Premise TFS platform.
- Download and install Power BI Desktop
- Launch Power BI and in the first screen click on Get Data
- On the Get Data window choose Database then SQL Analysis Services Database. Then click on Connect.
If you don’t have rights to query this DB ask for a read access.
- Now enter the Server instance name and click on OK.
- In the Navigator window you can now choose which dimension you want to work on.
For building dashboards regarding teams I use the Work Item perspective. - Now you’re all set to build nice data visualization reports.
Another post will follow on how quickly build some reports with Power BI.