Creating a centralized IT monitoring solution with Power BI
Power BI's rich data connectivity and transformation capabilities are very well suited for the integration needs of system and database administrators. A collection of log files containing performance monitor counter statistics can be retrieved from a file directory (or multiple directories), consolidated, and further enhanced to support reporting. Additional sources, such as snapshots of performance and configuration data stored in a dedicated administrator database, can also be included in a scheduled data refresh process, and the inclusion of existing BI dimension tables, such as date and time, further simplifies the overall monitoring solution.
In this recipe, a set of Windows Performance Monitor counter files containing statistics on CPU, memory, and more are integrated with administrative data stored in a SQL Server database, including query wait statistics and instance configuration values.