Production setup

The Production setup for the Microsoft Power BI connector is intended as the middle ground between the Scale and the Development setup. While the Scale setup is the best when it comes to scaling with data, the Production scales sufficiently well for clients that do not have large amounts of traffic.

Setup structure

This setup is a good fit for clients who:

• Do not care about putting bot data into a data lake to be analyzed alongside other data
• Do not want to get an Azure SQL service (or similar service)
• Have lighter traffic and may run dashboard using data for 3-6 months, rather than up to 12 months

Getting Started

Prerequisites

These instructions assume you have a Power BI Premium or Pro license and a published solution. Alternatively, you can publish and use the prebuilt Longberry Baristas solution and queries included in your free trial environment. The published bot should also have been in use in order to generate some interesting log data.

Retrieving the connector

The solution contains a .mez file that enables Power BI to connect to Teneo Inquire and execute shared queries. Shared queries can be created and saved in Studio at any time to allow a team of developers to quickly extract the information they need from a project's log data. When using the Power BI connector, this makes it easy to access the data needed for whatever Power BI visualizations the team is using. More information on how to create and save these queries can be found here.

1. Download the connector from GitHub.
2. Move the file to C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors. Alternatively, if your 'Documents' folder is located in 'OneDrive', use the path C:\Users\USERNAME\OneDrive\Documents\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors.

Enable Third party extensions

By default, Microsoft Power BI will not allow access for third party extensions unless they are manually enabled. To use our connector, we will need access.

Adjust the data extension security settings as follows:

1. In Power BI Desktop select 'File', followed by 'Options and settings'.
2. In 'Options', navigate to 'Security'.
3. Under 'Data Extensions', select (Not Recommended) Allow any extension to load without validation or warning.
4. Press 'OK', and then restart your Microsoft Power BI Desktop.

Writing Queries

The Power BI Saved Queries Connector supports converting the data types between Teneo Inquire and Power BI by utilizing type prefixes. This can be done in Teneo with the 'as' notation, demonstrated here, and variable prefixes. The following table contains examples of how to use variable prefixes:

Prefix	Example value	Description
d	d:Date	This prefix denotes a date, without the addition of time. If not stored as a date variable, Power BI will treat this value as text (string), and will not be able to compare different dates.
dt	dt:DateTime	This prefix denotes a date together with time. If not stored as a date and time variable, Power BI will treat this value as text (string), and will not be able to compare different dates.
f	f:Float	This is the prefix for a float number.
l	l:Logical	This prefix is used for logical values, e.g. a boolean.
n	n:Integer	This prefix is used for whole numbers without any decimals.
s	s:String	This is the prefix for a string.
t	t:Time	This is the prefix for a time, without the addition of date.

Publish Queries

The solution needs to have published shared queries. There are a few things to you need to do in order to be able to retrieve these in Power BI:

1. While inside the solution, select the 'SOLUTION' button located in the top left corner. This will take you to the solution backstage.
2. Select 'Optimization', followed by 'Log Data'.
3. Expand the 'Manage' button and open up the relevant 'Log Data Source'.
4. Write a query using Teneo Query Language.
5. While inside the same query, click the 'Share' button and give your query a name. This will make sure other developers who have access to the solution can use the same query without having to re-create it.

   Do not forget to add a descriptions to your query when you save them. This is crucial for Power BI to recognizing it.

6. As a last step, we will need to publish the query. This can be done by selecting the query from the 'Shared Queries' section to the left, followed by the 'Publish' button. After pressing that button, another 'Publish' button will appear; click that one as well.

Save query results

Once your queries have been written and published, they are ready to be used to access the data you need in Power BI. In order to access that data inside Power BI, you will first need to ask Teneo Inquire to save the query results. We have two alternative approaches for how to achieve this.

Alternative A: Save in Teneo

Teneo Inquire supports two ways of saving and exporting query results data: the first is from the Teneo Studio frontend and the second uses the save TQL command. Save stores query results using name as the data results identifier. When results have been saved, the source command can retrieve those results using the parameter name and use them as the source data for another query.

• This can be done inside Teneo by starting your queries with save (name="NAME") to save the query, and source (name="NAME") to load the saved results.

If we use the following query as an example, sample 1000 la t.e.userInput as 's:UserInput' : t.e.userInput ~= ".(\w.+\s).+", then the query can be saved as follows:

1. Run the following query to save the results under the name word_cloud: save (name="word_cloud") sample 1000 la t.e.userInput as 's:UserInput' : t.e.userInput ~= ".(\w.+\s).+". This will return a version number which indicates that your query has been successfully saved under the word_cloud name.
2. Now it is time to save and publish the source query to extract the information in Power BI. This can be done with the following query: la(source="word_cloud") s:UserInput.

Alternative B: Use a tool

In order to simplify and automate the steps from above, we have a powerful inquire-save-published-queries tool that saves and loads these results for you, with the possibilty of running scheduled jobs if required.

1. Download inquire-save-published-queries-6.1.1.jar and store it along with application.conf.
2. Edit application.conf file by adding your username, password, and Log Data Source(LDS). Hit 'Save as' to create a new .conf file with a different name, keeping the original file as a template with the name application.conf.

   Note that for each unique Log Data Soruce (LDS) you wish to access, you need a new copy of this file, but you need to make sure to also keep the original template file named application.conf.

3. In the command line, run the following command: java -jar inquire-save-published-queries-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar -Dconfig.file FILE_NAME.conf
4. Wait for the command to finish running. The query results should now be stored in the .JAR file and ready to be accessed by the Power BI connector.

Access data in Power BI

Now you're ready to try the Power BI Desktop data connector for Teneo.

1. Start off by opening your Power BI Desktop.
2. Located in the 'Data' section, select the 'Get Data' button. This will open up a list of connectors in your Power BI Desktop.
3. In the search bar, search for 'TeneoInquire' and select the connector that appears.

   If the connector does not appear, try redoing the steps from the prerequisites.

4. With the connector still selected, click on the 'Connect' button.
5. You will now be prompted to enter the URL of the Teneo Inquire instance and the desired LDS. Enter these and click on 'OK'. The URL and LDS should be in the following formats:

The Teneo Inquire URL looks like this: https://[your_team_name].data.teneo.ai/teneo-inquire/rest. You should replace [your team name] with the name of your team, which you can find in the top right corner when you log in to your environment in the browser.

The Log Data Source (LDS) is the last part of the Engine URL of your published solution. You can find it by opening the bots page in your browser.

6. Lastly, you will need to enter your login information to this Teneo environment. In a free trial, these can be retrieved from the free trial environment page. Enter these and click on 'OK'.

Congratulations, you have now made a connection between your Teneo solution and Power BI!

Build your own dashboards

The Teneo connector will transfer queries that are saved as 'Shared' to Power BI. The data retrieved from these queries are then used inside Power BI to create dashboards. In this step, we will demonstrate how you can quickly use the connector to build your first visual graph inside a dashboard.

1. Located on the right hand side is the 'Fields' section. Expand one of them and select any data.
2. Once selected, you will see a table of data appear.
3. With the data still selected, click on any appropriate visualization to create your first graph.

You have now created your first visualization inside Power BI with the Teneo connector!

Add more queries

Once you have connected your Teneo solution and Power BI, that data can be refreshed to automatically include new log data from new conversations with your bot. If necessary, you can also add more queries after the initial data load. To do this, simply write and publish your new queries in your Log Data Source (LDS) and then follow the steps from above on how to load data into your Power BI document, this time including the new queries which will now be accessible as long as they are published.

Tuning performance

• Please see Microsoft blogs for best practices in Power BI.
• Use a Power BI with premium license.
• Redesign your Teneo Query Language queries to aggregate transactional data to minutes, hours, or even days, depending on the balance between granularity and performance.

Download

• Register for a free trial on Teneo Developers to get access to Longberry Baristas here.
• Download the connector from GitHub .
• Import the solution into Teneo. For more details, see How to import solutions.