Chapter 6: Third-Party Utilities

In the previous two chapters, we used tools and data provided by Microsoft to get insights into report performance. In this chapter, we will cover some popular freely available third-party utilities that complement the built-in offerings and improve your productivity when investigating report performance issues.

These tools have a range of features, such as documenting our solutions, analyzing them to give recommendations, the ability to modify Power BI artifacts, capturing performance traces, and running queries. It is beyond the scope of this book to cover the full functionality of these tools, so we will limit our coverage to features and techniques that help us assess and improve performance.

The utilities introduced in this chapter are largely maintained by community contributors and are often open source. All the utilities described in this chapter are widely used to the point where they are formally acknowledged by Microsoft. Power BI Desktop will recognize them if they are installed on your computer and allow you to launch them from its External Tools menu, sometimes even connected to the .pbix file you are working on. At the time of writing, these utilities are actively maintained, and the releases are generally of high quality.

However, while the development of these open source tools is often stewarded by experts who run their own Power BI consulting and training businesses, they are not always officially supported, so you should bear this in mind. Your organization may have policies against the use of such tools. If you do use them, be aware that you may not be able to get prompt dedicated assistance as you normally would with a support case for a paid commercial offering.

All the utilities in this chapter can connect to Analysis Services datasets running within Power BI Desktop, Azure Analysis Services, or the Power BI service. Therefore, we will simply refer to these tools connecting to Analysis Services datasets for most of the chapter.

This chapter is broken into the following sections:

• Power BI Helper
• Tabular Editor
• DAX Studio and VertiPaq Analyzer