Why does the data have to be hosted?

[GillWare]

I'm new to PowerBI and I'm confused as to why the data has to be hosted in ArcGIS Online to be visible in the Addin. Why can't it see map services that have been shared with the Public?

[AdrianWelsh]

Gill,

Did you ever get an answer for this?

[GillWare]

@Adrian Welsh No, I think I read somewhere that connecting to the Enterprise will be available in the future but I really don't want to copy data to ArcGIS online when we already have a map service available. People here would really like to consume our secure map services to build dashboards just for internal staff use but this isn't possible. The data we have hosted and used cannot be published to the public which is all rather frustrating.  

[AdrianWelsh]

Is there a way to directly contact the Power BI team to get support?

Like Scott Ball‌ or Dorothy Ho‌ or if you have their support contact info?

[JoshJones2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Gill,

Apologies for the lack of an Esri response until now. My name is Josh and I'm the Lead Product Engineer for Esri's Microsoft Integration offerings.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to publish a service on ArcGIS Enterprise and then consume it in Maps for PowerBI, and you're questioning why you have to publish it to ArcGIS Online instead. You're correct in stating that at present we do not have the ability to connect from Maps for PowerBI into an ArcGIS Enterprise deployment due to a number of technical reasons (but principally because ArcGIS Maps for PowerBI lives within the Microsoft ecosystem, so reaching out to an arbitrary URL poses some challenges).

We're actively engaged with Microsoft to figure out how to solve this, and we're working hard to try to get things fixed. I don't have a timeframe for you yet unfortunately, but we are working towards this as hard as we can.

Josh

[GillWare]

Thank you for the response. I'm wondering if the Operations Dashboard would be the way forward for my GIS Users.

[JoshJones2]

It depends on your use case specifically and what you're looking to accomplish - Insights for ArcGIS is also an option if you're more heavily leaning toward the BI piece.

It would probably be a good idea to have a chat with your Esri account manager to see if they can go through the options in detail with you.