Power BI is an expensive but useful visualization tool for data.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We capture a lot of vehicle data and need a way to display and filter it for clients. Specifically, we need to help them answer the question "where are the elevated levels of risk for my drivers?" Each telemetry point is matched with human-labeled "road errors," which are then used to determine the driver's level of risk and the elevated risk to a company's fleet as a whole. Power BI helps organize, display (the ArcGIS plugin), and deploy this data for our clients.
Pros
- Pulling, syncing, and serving large tranches of data.
- Filtering data in tables.
- Providing a way to show live intuitive tables without needing to write a script.
Cons
- The pricing for the tier to have publicly, universally accessible reports was, for a long time, cost-prohibitive.
- Difficulty setting up gateway networks for data privacy.
- OData interface was buggy at times, and slow.
Return on Investment
- It's very expensive for standalone public reporting, and we have considered leaving for that reason at times.
- We've been able to show patterns clearly to our clients using the ArcGIS plugin.
- We've been able to avoid slowing down our main database.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Plotly Chart Studio
Other Software Used
Azure App Service, Azure AI Vision, Microsoft 365 Copilot
