wirepas innovation project introdownload.microsoft.com/.../wirepas-powerbi.pdfdesigning the report...
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Wirepas – Innovation Project
Intro • Solution overview
The solution simplifies displaying massive amount of sensor data collected for a parcel
tracking service. Which parcel is at what time at what location? Which status have the
parcels?
All data collect with the help of Wirepas IoT technology.
• Key technologies used
Power BI Embedded, Azure App Services
• Core Team:
Rudolf von Stokar, Country Manager Germany, Austria, Switzerland,
Oliver Scheer, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft,
Customer profile
• Wirepas, www.wirepas.com
• Wirepas is focused on providing the most reliable, optimized and scalable device
connectivity to its customers. With their help customers can digitalize their current
business processes and innovate for new disruptive models. With Wirepas Connectivity
there is no need for traditional repeaters, because every wireless device is a smart router
of the network. The connected devices are the network – easy as that. In nature, things are
communicating making autonomous decisions based on the protocol that is optimized to
fulfill the need as efficiently as possible – nothing more, nothing less. This is also what
Wirepas is all about.
• Wirepas has its headquarters in Tampere, Finland and offices in France, Germany, South
Korea and the United States.
• Wirepas was established 2010 in Tampere, Finland. The company has its roots at Tampere
University of Technology where a ten-year research project was conducted around the
radio frequency mesh technology. Wirepas is a privately owned company. Its shareholders
include founders, Inventure Investment Fund, management shareholders and private
investors.
Problem statement
The technology of Wirepas is collecting a wide variety of data by its connectivity service. Every
wireless device build on Wirepas software technology, can collect and send a huge amount of
data. This data is collected in several ways, in databases and files of the cusotmers. Visualizing this
data is key to get an overview of current state of "things" tracked by the technology.
The end user of our developed solution are the customer of Wirepas. They need an
"interpretation" of the collected IoT data, to get overview and to make easier decisions.
Solution, steps, and delivery Parts of the solutions are currently online here: https://wirepas.azurewebsites.net
1. Acquiring the data
The data collected by the Wirepas technology is collected in customer "storage". This can be files,
databases, etc. A supporting customer gave us access to their data. This data has to be imported,
and cleaned up. For the Proof-of-concept, we used Power BI directly.
For the proof of concept, we imported the data from a csv file, which was exported from a
customers database. In further versions we will connect directly to the database, with the Direct
Query Feature, in the meantime, we use import.
2. Cleaning the data
The data has a domain specific model. This has to be cleaned up, and converted to a human
readable format. We did this by using Power Query. We gave sense to plain Ids, to enable
readable values to the end consumer, like "1000" --> "Region South".
3. Designing the report using Power BI Desktop
After importing and cleaning the data of 1 million sensor data, we used Power BI to design
dashboards which enables the customer to get overviews of all data, and enables him to drill
down to one single parcel, and the parcel history.
Some impressions of the dashboard.
4. Creating a Power BI Workspace
To create the Power BI Workspace in Azure, we used the powerbi-cli. Currently there is no UI
available to create workspaces for Power BI in Azure, therefor we used the powerbi-cli
https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerBI-Cli
Power BI CLI can be easly installed via npm:
npm install powerbi-cli -g
Creating a workspace is done by the following statement:
powerbi create-workspace -c wirepasreports -k <key_to_powerbiembedded_in_azure>
5. Uploading PBIX-File
To upload a Power BI Report to this Workspace you only need an additional command of powerbi-cli
powerbi import -c wirepasreports -k <key_to_powerbiembedded_in_azure> -w <the_name_of_workspace> -f <the_filepath_to_the_thereport> -n Overview -o
6. Embed Power BI in Web App
Power BI embedded enables developers to embedded reports in almost every kind of app. The
easiest way is, embedding it into a nice website. To get a website, we used Azure Web App to
host a simple Asp.Net MVC App based on a standard template for Power BI embedded
(https://github.com/Azure-Samples/power-bi-embedded-integrate-report-into-web-app).
• Architecture diagram/s (required). Example below:
• One learning by Microsoft was the amount and type of data, which we structured and
converted. Power Query is an awesome tool for ETL-Processes.
• Wirepas was positively suprised by the speed and friction free tooling, and uploading of
Dashboards.
Next Steps The running solution is the first project Azure Project using Power BI embedded. Wirepas is
fascinated about Power BI embedded on Azure, and the easiness and speed of implementation.
We are already working on the next steps. Next steps are pushing the sensor data to Azure IoT
Hub, and with the help of stream jobs to SQL Database and also for custom analyzing tools to
blobstorage as well. Blobstorage is triggering Azure Functions to send messages to customers
("Your parcel has passed station xyz").
For Wirepas it was a proof for the Power of Microsoft Technologies, delivering IoT Data fast and
easy to consumers. The first public presentation was at the Bosch Connected World.
Conclusion For Wirepas it was a very smart and easy way to bring their IP to the cloud, in an easy and fast
implementation. The whole project needed only 10 Hours of calls, consulting, and
implementation.
• It is very easy to bring complex data to Power BI and convert it to easy data for faster
descisions on the web.
• For the Bosch Connected World, it was an easy demonstration of complex data. Based on
Azure and Power BI embedded.
• Opportunities going forward:
After demonstrating the fast and easy process of creating and deploying dashboards to
the Azure Cloud, the next steps are enabling real life data by connecting customers
database directly to Power BI embedded, instead of importing data manual.
The evaluation of the Azure IoT Hub is also on the roadmap, which could be used in
different customer scenarios.
Since the workshop and now, Wirepas already won several new customers, which are
using Wirepas products and dashboards powered by Power BI embedded.
CUSTOMER QUOTE
We have used Power BI to reformat Millions of lines of sensor data for the usage in Azure.
Handling Power BI was extremely easy, results are visible on the fly. Microsoft Azure immediately
took this data for vistualization and we were able to analyze our data on anormalities right away.
Rudolf von Stokar, Country Manager, Wirepas*