Microsoft Power BI intigration

Thanks for your patience & understanding. Here's how we'll address this need.

- In addition to the existing custom reports on freshservice, that can already address tickets/assets / changes reporting needs, we're building a rich reporting layer that enables: 

-  Reporting on Releases,Problems, Users, departments, agent groups & tasks

-  Rich Interactive Visualizations with :

-- Interactive drill-downs

-- Filtering, grouping data by multiple attributes

- Custom Reporting Dashboard 

-- Ability to pin reports to a dashboard to effectively monitor key performance metrics in near real-time and make informed decisions.

- Reporting across modules

-- e.g: Ability to report on tickets that are associated to changes with a high impact

We will share mocks on these later this month and we expect this to be available to customers in Q1.

For customers/prospects that still need BI level capabilities outside of these, we're considering the following options:

- Leverage a developer partner to build a powerBI integration on top of our data APIs. We're connecting with a couple of partners and should have an update for you by EOM. This will be limited by our underlying APIs, but we're constantly adding to it.

- Data on activities (either as scheduled exports or other options) across all entities that allows you to leverage powerBI or any other BI tool to build advanced reports. This will be a phased approach, but we're unable to comment on the timeframe for this yet.

We'll continue to post updates on this thread in the coming days. Pls let us know what you think. 

This is why we're looking to move away from FreshService. After 2 years of asking for PowerBI integration and receiving multiple communications about how Fresh Service "has partners" or "is close" we see that FreshService is now focusing on building their own reporting tools. For those of us who have been practically begging for PowerBI, we see that we've been relegated to those customers who "still need" PowerBI integration and that FreshService is “considering the following options…”

Venkat, I’m sure you wanted to placate the barbarians at your gate who were looking for a positive and motivating communication from FreshService about PowerBI integration, but this is a swing and a miss…

Hi Venkat,

Once again, I find myself severely disappointed in FreshService's response.  You can build up your reporting module forever but, I promise, you won't be able to match the reporting capabilities of a true BI tool.  I'm not sure you all understand that this isn't just about reporting capability either. A dedicated BI tool provides a single page for management and employees to report on all IT metrics.  You will never be able to provide a single dashboard that contains everything management or employees want to see.  ITIL and ITSM tools with top notch reporting capability still provide Power BI connectors (ZenDesk & ServiceNow).

I've said it multiple times to multiple CAMs and I've said it in this thread.  If you gave us the ability to export all of our ticket data on a schedule, I wouldn't need a Power BI Connector...

I'm in complete agreement with Michael - "swing and a miss".  I don't think your response is what any of us were hoping or looking for. 

 

One of the features with Power BI that we can create own dashboards, by manipulating data feed from Fresh service.  As soon we have feed then its easy cerate look as required and publish for other departments in company.  Reports that are available now "locked" for FreshService admins/tech and need to be exported first, as PDF, then sent by email.  

If you give feed to Power BI, I can see live status, updates and share with company CEO/other executives, as weekly updates. And this can be combined with other metric in one dashboard which also available in mobile app. All that upper management need to do is open app at any time and see live status of various data/reports, rather then looking though email and opening attachments. 

Any reports created inside Fresh service will stay there, and cant be accessed by other people in company then pretty much useless for most who don't have Freshservice "admin" account.

I can be wrong, but think it shouldn't be much development to give some access to Freshservice data though one of the Power BI supported data formats (Odata, ODBC, various SQL). Only need build connector between PowerBI and Freshservice API. 

Hi Venkat, 

Appreciated the communication but agree with the above posts.  This feature request is specifically about power bi integration.  We are asking for the ability to self serve.  I'm not sure what the hesitation is here as this feature makes your life easier.

Whilst I agree that your out of the box reporting needs work, it is a different use case to what people have requested on this thread.

Having a connector into fresh service data means I can create reports to show me what I want, not what you think I want.  Bare minimum a scheduled export of data to an azure data location etc would work.

Rob

I'll add that this is disappointing and I will second the notion that being able to export my ticket data with some kind of schedule automatically would essentially solve this problem for me.

Still no real word on this request, I note from Venat's most recent post promises of...

1. Sharing mock ups? Not seen those
2. Continuing to post updates on this thread in the coming days? Not seen any?

We went live early October last year and I am under considerable pressure from my Senior Management Team to provide some meaninful data (ideally through Power BI) and my promises that 'Freshservice are working on it' have worn very thin.

They want dashboards created through Power Bi, we have some good examples of this working with other systems and my queue managers want similar for the job queues they are responsible for.

Please can I get an update to relay back before I present next years licencing charges for them to sign off?

Thanks

Dan Hollands

IT Service Desk Manager

Stockport Council

Dan Hollands - I user Power BI to report to my senior board. There is small element of downloading the exported data from the email I receive on request, and then overwriting the existing file in OneDrive and allowing PowerBI to refresh. 

5 minutes works tops. 

Ideally I would like to see this automated but it works for me. Just thought I would share!

Wayne - we currently automate the export of Ticket, requester and agent data using the API and pump into a local SQL database where we report using SSRS, though this could be linked to Power BI. This is however limited as not all data we would like to report on is available through the API.

Hello all,

Sorry for the delayed response. 

As pointed out above, any connector built on top of Freshservice APIs are limited by the data exposed by the underlying APIs. We believe that scheduling data exports is the more scalable approach to address advanced reporting needs and the solution that will solve for the many advanced/self-serve reporting use-cases with BI tools like Tableau/PowerBI etc. We have already prioritized this feature as part of our Q2 roadmap. 

In the meantime, we're currently working with a couple of developers to address the urgent need of more useful powerBI dashboards with pre-defined metrics on top of our existing APIs. This will be available on the Freshservice app marketplace. I've attached screenshots of this dashboard for your reference.

I'm also attaching mocks for our analytics solution that we're currently building into Freshservice. With Analytics in Freshservice,

- users can pin reports to a dashboard to effectively monitor service desk performance

- rich visualisations with interactive drill-downs

- reporting across all modules (tickets, tasks, problems, changes, release, groups, users, departments)

Thank you for all the inputs and please keep your feedback coming! We'll continue to update you here as we make progress on these items. 

Deepikaa

Freshservice Product Management 

Thank you for sharing this progress Deepika. I really hope we can get our hands on the connector in the marketplace soon. I (and many others) would be more than happy to test and provide some preliminary feedback if you care to enable it.

That's great news Deepika, those screenshots look really good, can't wait to get my hands on it! 

I'd be interested to know how often we will be able to schedule the data exports, as these will need to support live wallboards in our organisation. 

Thanks again.

Has anyone setup FS with Power BI desktop using the API? Curious?

What seems to be the hold up on the API with PowerBI integration? You have it available for Power APPS which is a newer MS offering than Power BI.

Has anyone successfully setup FS with Power BI desktop? Using the API?

Deepika, why did FS choose to create a link to the newer service PowerApps when it is clear your customers wanted Power BI?

 

Hello, 

We have developed  a demo application which allows to query data from Freshservice in Power BI. It presents information about tickets and can be easy extended further. 

Best Regards,

Derek

 Derek, How are you getting the data? Via the Web API? I cannot seem to get the API to work. It keeps telling me I need to provide an Api Key Name.

Hi Josh,

The application connects through Web API using API key. What client do you use to connect to the service?

Regards,

Derek

apps.devel@outlook.com

Derek,

Where can I get more details on this please?

Thanks

A

I'm no expert in the programming / coding aspect of this functionality, but I have at least managed to get PowerBI pulling some data from the API.

The issue I'm currently stuck with is that when the query returns more than one page, I'm sure I just haven't stumbled upon the right Google result to help me with this yet, if anyone here has sorted this and can share, that'd be fantastic !

pete

Hi Adam Dunn,

The Freshservice connector is able to synchronize data with local or in the cloud ms sql and my sql databases.

It is possible to provide OData interface in cloud as well, although that would require more efforts. Power BI can consume data from all these sources. We're trying to establish what is demand and who would like to take part in a pilot.

Please email me on apps.devel@outlook.com for further details.

Best Regards,

Derek

Hello All, 

The integration with Power BI preview is available  under https://webfreshreport.azurewebsites.net for testing.  

Please don't hesitate to contact with us in case of any questions. 

Best Regards,

Derek, 

Hello All, 

 

We have enabled export of 1000 tickets in the  https://webfreshreport.azurewebsites.net  service to Power BI.   

Please don't hesitate to contact with us in case of any questions. 

Best Regards,

Derek, 

FYI, there is an App in the FreshService marketplace provided by Radiare. I have tried this in the hopes that it would provide access to the raw data in a format that was easily accessible by a Power BI query. However that does not seem to be what they offer.

What they do provide is a link to a static report that while interesting is not able to be modified. I also think they may have some problems with their refresh mechanism as the data has not been updated since I was provided access.

I think I will resurrect my own attempts to pull the data via the API, I had made some progress with v1 of the FreshService API, and got stuck with V2 (Same as Pete's response from 2018-02-06). The challenge seems to be in getting PowerBI to recognise, request and load multiple pages of json response.

What's the official FreshService update on this? I thought there was supposed to be a solution in Q2?