Boost Your Business Intelligence: Automating Power BI with Workload Automation

Let us begin by understanding Microsoft Power BI, its capabilities, and how the Power BI Plug-in enhances HCL Automation Orchestration users by enabling seamless orchestration of dataset refreshes and monitoring. This integration empowers businesses to maintain real-time, data-driven insights with minimal manual intervention.
The Microsoft Power BI plugin can be downloaded from Automation Hub to enhance your Workload Automation setup.

In today’s data-driven business environment, timely and accurate reporting is critical for effective decision-making. Power BI, Microsoft’s powerful business analytics service, enables organizations to visualize and share insights across teams. By integrating Microsoft Power BI with Workload Automation, businesses can automate and refresh datasets and ensure their dashboards are always up to date, eliminating delays, reducing errors, and improving operational efficiency.

In today’s data-driven business environment, timely and accurate reporting is critical for effective decision-making. Power BI, Microsoft’s powerful business analytics service, enables organizations to visualize and share insights across teams. By integrating Microsoft Power BI with Workload Automation, businesses can automate and refresh datasets and ensure their dashboards are always up to date, eliminating delays, reducing errors, and improving operational efficiency.

Key Features of the Microsoft Power BI Plug-in:
The Microsoft Power BI Plug-in for Workload Automation simplifies and strengthens business intelligence workflows. Key capabilities include:

• Dataset Refresh Automation: Automate the refresh of Power BI datasets, ensuring that your reports and dashboards reflect the latest data without manual intervention.
• Real-Time Status Monitoring: Gain real-time visibility into the status of your dataset refresh jobs directly from Workload Automation, with detailed logs for diagnostics and auditing.
• Job Chaining and Dependencies: Create complex workflows where a Power BI dataset refresh is dependent on the successful completion of upstream data loading or ETL jobs, ensuring data accuracy.
• Error Handling and Alerting: Configure Workload Automation to detect refresh failures, trigger automated retry attempts, and send alerts to relevant teams for swift resolution.
• Parameterization: Pass runtime parameters to control which datasets are refreshed, providing flexibility and enabling dynamic, data-driven refresh policies.

Use Cases:

• Automated Reporting: Schedule and automate daily, weekly, or monthly report generation by ensuring all underlying data is refreshed on time.
• Sales and Financial Dashboards: Ensure that key sales, revenue, and financial dashboards are updated with the latest figures before the start of each business day.
• Supply Chain Analytics: Automate the refresh of supply chain data to provide real-time insights into inventory levels, logistics, and order fulfillment.
• On-Demand Data Refresh: Enable business users to trigger a dataset refresh for a specific report on-demand without needing to log in to Power BI directly.
• Compliance and Auditing: Maintain a complete audit trail of all dataset refresh activities for compliance and data governance purposes.

Example Workflow: Lead management
A financial services firm using Workload Automation to orchestrate a daily reporting process with Microsoft Power BI.

• Orchestration: Workload Automation is scheduled to run a daily workflow at 3 AM after all overnight data loads are complete.
• ETL Job Completion: The workflow begins by ensuring that all upstream ETL jobs (e.g., in a data warehouse) have successfully finished, guaranteeing the source data is ready.
• Power BI Refresh Trigger: Once the source data is ready, Workload Automation triggers the Microsoft Power BI plugin to initiate a refresh of the "Daily Financials" dataset.
• Real-time Monitoring: The plugin monitors the refresh job, providing real-time status updates and a final result (success or failure) to the Workload Automation dashboard.
• Report Generation and Distribution: Upon successful completion of the dataset refresh, Workload Automation triggers a job that generates a PDF of the refreshed report and automatically distributes it to the management team via email.

Getting Started with the Microsoft Power BI Plug-in.
To begin using the Microsoft Power BI Plug-in, follow these steps:
1. Connect to Microsoft Power BI 
Log in to the Dynamic Workload/UNO Console and open the Workload Designer/Designer. Create a new job definition/task template and select the Microsoft Power BI.

• Tenant ID and Client ID: Provide the Tenant ID and Client ID.
• Password: Provide the Client Secret Value. 
• Test Connection: Please check the connection to ensure that the credentials configure correctly.​​

2. Define the Action
In the Action tab, specify the details of the document that need to be processed.

• ​Group Id: Select the Group Id.
• Dataset ID: Select the Dataset Id.
• Body: Enter the body and it should be in application/json format.​

3. Add/Save and Submit/Run your Job
​Once the job is clearly defined, add/save it and submit/run it to the current plan. Add the job to a job stream to automate your business process flow. You can monitor the job execution in the Monitoring View.

4. Monitor Job Execution
Track the job’s progress in the Monitor Page. If the job completes successfully, the status updates to Successful.

Why Choose the Microsoft Power BI Plug-in?
Businesses can automate reporting processes using the Microsoft Power BI Plug-in, ensuring that dashboards are updated with the most recent data on a regular basis. You may improve data accuracy and decision-making time by centralizing and streamlining analytics activities through integration with Workload Automation.
Whether you are monitoring sales performance, financial metrics, or operational KPIs, this plug-in is your gateway to smarter, real-time business intelligence.

In Conclusion:
​The Microsoft Power BI plugin for Workload Automation provides a powerful bridge between your operational workflows and your business intelligence. By orchestrating the automated refresh of your Power BI datasets, you can ensure that your organization consistently makes decisions based on the most current and accurate data, ultimately driving greater efficiency and improved business outcomes.

Job Log Details: -
===============================================================
= JOB : /CLOUD#PowerBI001_JOBS [(0938 07/24/2025)]. PowerBI001
= JOB STREAM ID: c633812a-e8b6-4496-946b-a01624128c51
= JOB ID: febd4fd4-08ea-4b3c-bdd6-cd884b972435
= TASK :
---
microsoftpowerbi:
  Connection:
    tenantId: 103ebdb2XXXXXXX-ec7115fa483a
    clientId: 2045d3d8-XXXXXXX-088ce4d6822b
    password: "**********"
  Action:
    invoke:
      groupId: "c9ff3c67-XXXXXXXXXX-94da529a5f: Demo"
      datasetId: "cff42655-XXXXXXXXX-ce4866ffde1e: AzureBlob"

= AGENT: /CLOUD
= Job Number: 18515
= Mon 07/28/2025 12:15:44 Z: 
===============================================================
Executing Dataset Refresh request for Group ID: c9ff3c67-XXXXXXXXXX-94da529a5f, Dataset ID: cff42655-XXXXXXXXX-ce4866ffde1e 

The request to refresh the dataset has been accepted, and the refresh is currently in progress.
 Dataset refresh status for ID: cff42655-XXXXXXXXX-ce4866ffde1e is: Completed

Dataset refresh result : {"requestId":"59e82514-ebf5-4039-b072-42680b0d7bc7","refreshType":"ViaApi","startTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:48.793Z","id":227209349,"endTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:53.62Z","refreshAttempts":[{"startTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:49.4167013Z","endTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:52.4479694Z","type":"Data","attemptId":1},{"startTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:52.7604731Z","endTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:53.2917283Z","type":"Query","attemptId":1}],"status":"Completed"}


===============================================================
= Exit Status: 0
===============================================================
= Output Properties: 
=   datasetId: cff42655-XXXXXXXXX-ce4866ffde1e 
=   groupId: c9ff3c67-XXXXXXXXXX-94da529a5f 
=   result       : {"requestId":"59e82514-ebf5-4039-b072-42680b0d7bc7","refreshType":"ViaApi","startTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:48.793Z","id":227209349,"endTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:53.62Z","refreshAttempts":[{"startTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:49.4167013Z","endTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:52.4479694Z","type":"Data","attemptId":1},{"startTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:52.7604731Z","endTime":"2025-07-28T12:15:53.2917283Z","type":"Query","attemptId":1}],"status":"Completed"}
===============================================================
= Elapsed Time (hh:mm: ss): 00:00:10
= Mon 07/28/2025 12:15:55 Z
===============================================================

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Ernesto Carrabba, Product Manager, HCL Clara, HCL HERO and HCL Workload Automation 
Ernesto Carrabba is the Product Manager for HCL Clara, HCL HERO and HCL Workload Automation. Ernesto is a very dynamic product manager with experience in building and launching IoT products, combined with a master's degree in mechanical engineering and study researches on Augmented and Virtual Reality 

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Spardha (Senior Software Engineer)
Expertise in Java development, specializing in HCL Workload Automation within the WA Plugin Factory team. I am passionate about leveraging advanced technologies to solve complex problems and enhance user experiences.

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