Data Visualization Layer

Note: The Data Visualization Layer described here requires customers to obtain a Power BI license through Microsoft and is not included as part of Student Analytics.

The Data Visualization layer leverages Microsoft Power BI, enabling users to connect to the semantic model (as a dataset) and create rich visualizations which can be organized on a canvas to build Reports or pinned to build Dashboards and shared across the enterprise.

An administrator must subscribe to the Power BI cloud offering from Microsoft and set up a tenant before using Student Analytics. The tenant is the container for items of your institution such as users, domains, subscriptions, and so on.

The On-premises Data Gateway needs to be configured for the SQL Server Analysis Services tabular model. When you use the gateway, there is a live connection to an Analysis Services tabular model database located on-premises. When you interact with a visualization, queries are sent from Power BI directly to the database. The updated data is then returned and visualizations are updated. Your data remains on-premises. Because there is a direct connection between Power BI and the database, there is no need to set up a refresh schedule.

For more details, see Analytics for On-Prem and PaaS in Installation Manager Help in Installation Manager Help.