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Carousel Cloud and Power BI

  • Updated

Carousel Cloud can securely integrate with Power BI to display reports live on your digital signage!

This document will teach you how to set up your Power BI integration using a service principal in Microsoft Entra ID (required). This will allow you to display reports you have permitted the service principal access to. You can grant access to multiple workspaces and reports using a single service principle. See your Microsoft Entra ID administrator for details.

The ability to use Power BI in this way requires embed tokens. You may have a trial amount to use depending on your Power BI and Azure subscription type. Still, they will eventually run out unless you Create a Power BI Embed Capacity or a Power BI Premium Capacity, or a Microsoft Fabric Capacity. Please see your Power BI administrator for details.

Please note - Customers utilizing Azure Govcloud will require additional configuration from Carousel. Please reach out to our support department for assistance.

Notes and Performance Considerations

  • Power BI Datasets using Row Level Security (RLS) are not supported.

  • The capacity used for Power BI directly affects how quickly resource-intensive reports load. See Capacity Planning in Power BI for more information.

  • When using a Microsoft Fabric capacity, F2 capacity and above are supported.

  • Carousel requires that your reports finish loading before they will display. For live reports, Carousel will wait 20 seconds for that loading to complete, and if it does not load within that time, the bulletin will be skipped.

  • Carousel does its best to display all your data visualizations as designed, but complex reports with long load times and other factors can make that difficult. There are ways in the PowerBI desktop app and the PowerBI service to optimize your reports for use with Carousel. Below are some articles with more info on how to make your visualizations more performant.

Player Behavior

Power BI bulletins will display across all Carousel Player types. The only difference in bulletin behavior is that because Apple TVs can not display web-based content, they will use a snapshot regardless of the setting between live and snapshot. LG WebOS and Mersive Solstice players will also always use a snapshot regardless of the setting as they lack the internal capacity to load live reports.

The complexity and density of your reports will also affect the bulletin loading time on certain player types with limited processing capacity. Keeping your reports simple will help with longer loading times and underpowered players.

Important note for Brightsign Players

Authenticating Carousel with Power BI

Setup Microsoft Entra ID

To set up an External Authentication for Carousel and Power BI, register Carousel as an Application and create a service principal in Microsoft Entra ID. Then, get these three pieces of information from it:

  • Tenant ID

  • Client ID

  • Client Secret
    Certificate auth not supported at this time

First, use this article to create a service principal in Microsoft Entra ID. You must have adequate access; please see your admin for details.

Once you have created it, follow the article sections “Get tenant and app ID values for signing in” and “Option 3: Create a new client secret” to obtain the information required for your Carousel External Authentication.

 

Setup Power BI

Tenant Settings

Now that you have a service principal, you must give it API access to your Tenant. You must follow Step 6 of this article to allow Carousel to access the Power BI API.

Workspace Access

You will now need to give the service principal permission to access the Power BI Workspaces from which you would like to display reports. Select Access in your Power BI workspace. The service principal will need direct access to the workspace; using a group isn't supported.

Then, search for your service principal and give it access. Repeat this process for all workspaces you would like Carousel to have access to.

 

Please note: It takes some time for Power BI to register the service principal, so please allow a few minutes after creating/editing one before authenticating with Carousel.

Setup External Authentication

In the Carousel UI, click on your username in the upper right, select Configure, and select System.

There, you will select External Authentications on the left-hand side and create a New Authentication.

There, you will give your Authentication a name. This name will display when creating a Power BI Bulletin. Then, you will enter the Tenant ID, Client ID, and Client Secret that you have gotten from the above Microsoft KB.

 

Now, all you need to do is Save your new External Authentication, and you can use it to create Power BI bulletins in Carousel!

Power BI Bulletin Creation

To create a Power BI bulletin, navigate to the zone you would like it to display in, select New Bulletin, select Dynamic as the type, and then select Power BI.

 

Select the Authentication you just created from the drop-down menu. The Workspace, Report, and Dashboard drop-down menus will contain all the workspaces, reports, and dashboards you have given Carousel access to using your service principal. If those menus are empty, you must grant access in Microsoft Entra ID and try again.

You can also select whether you would like your PowerBI bulletins to display live on your signage players or if you would like them to display a snapshot that updates every 15 minutes. AppleTV media players will always display snapshots as they lack an internal web browser to display a live report. Choosing the snapshot option allows you to set a load time of up to 30 seconds for the report to load before the snapshot is taken. Using snapshots may reduce the cost of your embedded capacity in some situations.

 

Once you have selected your desired workspace, you can toggle between Reports or Dashboards for that given Workspace. If you choose a dashboard, you can move on to the next step. If you choose a report, you will now be given the option to choose the Page or Bookmark for that report.

Once you have selected the options from PowerBI, schedule your bulletin, apply any other desired settings, and select Publish.

July 2024 - “Time to upgrade your browser” Popup

Beginning in July 2024, Microsoft began adding a popup to some Power BI reports indicating the usage of an outdated browser for display. Carousel Cloud does not have versioning control over the browsers used for display. The hardware manufacturer controls this versioning via their own software and firmware updates. Any questions about these updates should be directed to the manufacturers.

If you have a touch or mouse-enabled screen, you may be able to clear this popup manually by clicking the checkbox not to show again.

To remove the popup programmatically until a browser update occurs, you must edit the bulletin only to show a snapshot of the report rendered within Carousel Cloud and automatically updated every 15 minutes.

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