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Carousel Cloud and Power BI

  • Updated

Carousel Cloud can integrate and access your Power BI reports and dashboards to display on your digital signage.

Please Note:

  • Power BI is only available on our Pro and Enterprise support plans.

  • Using Power BI data in Carousel Cloud requires Power BI embed tokens. You may have a trial amount to use depending on your Power BI and Azure subscription type, but they will eventually run out unless you Create a Power BI Embed Capacity, a Power BI Premium Capacity, or a Microsoft Fabric Capacity. Please see your Power BI administrator for more details.

    • Additionally, loading Power BI content ‘live’ instead of ‘snapshot’ (as shown in the Power BI bulletin editor in Carousel Cloud) can increase your embed token usage because every time the player reloads the Power BI content, it will likely consume an embed token.

  • Customers utilizing Azure Government Cloud will require additional system configuration from our support team before you can configure the Power BI external authentication in Carousel Cloud. Please submit a ticket that includes your specific Government Cloud tenant type (GCC, GCCHigh, or DoD) to begin this process.

  • Client secrets are the only supported authentication method.

  • Additional notes regarding Power BI are posted at the end of this article.

General Player Behavior

  • Power BI bulletins will display across all Carousel Cloud Player types, but their specific playback behavior is described in this player feature matrix.

  • The complexity and density of your reports will 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.

Power BI Setup Process (Condensed)

The following 3 steps are a condensed version of the required actions to get your app registration set up in Entra/Azure, the correct permissions configured in Power BI, and add the Power BI external authentication in Carousel Cloud.

  1. Entra/Azure

    1. Create an app registration (AKA service principal)

    2. Create a client secret for the app registration

      1. Copy to clipboard or password vault after creation for later use in Carousel Cloud

  2. Power BI

    1. In the Power BI > Admin Portal menu, enable the options for:

      1. Service principal can use Fabric API's

      2. Allow at least the service principal, if not the entire organization, the ability to Embed content in apps

    2. Make the service principal from Entra/Azure either a member or admin of the workspace/s you want to display in Carousel Cloud

  3. Carousel Cloud Setup

    1. Final steps are located under Setup External Authentication in the article posted below

Power BI Setup Process (Expanded)

Set Up Microsoft Entra ID

  1. First, use this article to create a service principal in Microsoft Entra ID

  2. Once you have created the service principal, you will then need to create and save a client secret following these instructions

    1. You can only view and copy the client secret while you are creating it, so you will need to save it somewhere because you can’t access it after creation

  3. When connecting Power BI to Carousel Cloud later in this process, you will use the values for Client ID and Tenant ID, as shown in the screenshot below. You will also need the client secret you just created.

Configure Power BI

Tenant Settings

  1. As shown below, you must enable the options in the Power BI Admin portal to allow API access and the ability to Embed content in apps. You can follow Step 6 of this article to allow the Carousel Cloud app registration to have access to the Fabric API.

    1. If you use Microsoft Fabric, the admin portal can be found in the settings after logging in to: https://app.powerbi.com/

    2. You can grant these permissions to a specific security group; just make sure your service principal is in that group

Workspace Access

  1. You will now need to give the service principal permission to access the Power BI workspaces from which you would like to display reports

  2. Click on Manage access

  1. Give your service principal access as a Member or Admin

  2. Repeat this process for all workspaces you would like Carousel Cloud to have access to

    1. You cannot use a group for workspace access. It must be the service principal, and the service principal must have Member or Admin access.

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

Create External Authentication for Power BI in Carousel Cloud

  1. Navigate to Configure > System > Org Accounts > New and choose Microsoft Power BI from the drop-down menu

  1. Name your Microsoft Power BI authentication

    1. This name will display when creating a Power BI bulletin

  2. Copy and paste the Tenant ID, Client ID, and Client Secret that you created in Entra ID in the first section of this article

  1. Click Save

Create the Power BI Bulletin in Carousel Cloud

  1. 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 Microsoft Power BI

  1. Select the Power BI account you just created from the Connected Account drop-down menu

  1. The Workspace, Reports, and Dashboards options will contain all the workspaces, reports, and dashboards you have given Carousel Cloud access to using your service principal

    1. If these menus are empty, you must double-check both the workspace access for the Carousel Cloud service principal in Power BI and also the Power BI tenant settings. Then try to create the Power BI bulletin again.

  1. You can select whether you would like your Power BI bulletins to display live on your signage players or if you would like them to display a snapshot that updates every 15 minutes

    1. Choosing the snapshot option allows you to set a Snapshot Delay (load time) of up to 30 seconds for the report to load before the snapshot is taken. This will help (and may be required) for consistent loading/displaying of complex Power BI reports or dashboards.

  2. Once you have selected your desired workspace, you can toggle between Reports or Dashboards for that given Workspace

    1. If you choose a dashboard, you can move on to the next step

    2. If you choose a report, you will now be given the option to choose the Page or Bookmark for that report

  3. After configuring the Power BI bulletin, you can simply hit the orange Publish button in the upper-right corner of the Power BI bulletin screen. The Power BI bulletin creation process is complete!

Additional Notes:

Advanced Troubleshooting

  • If Carousel Cloud can’t access a Power BI Report using the service principal, it typically shows a white screen in the Preview when creating the Power BI Bulletin. This is usually because the service principal does not have direct access as a Member to the workspace containing the report.

  • If you encounter this, the best way to identify the problem is to toggle ‘Display a live report,' open the Web Inspector, and look for errors in the Console or Network tab while attempting to select the report. The specific error will be in the response for the request call that uses /getembedinfo?token=…

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

  • Carousel Cloud 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 Power BI desktop app and the Power BI service to optimize your reports for use with Carousel Cloud. Below are some articles with more info on how to make your visualizations more performant.

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