How do you connect an Azure Table Storage with Power BI through Stream Analytics?

Question

I am new to Azure. I have data being entered into an Azure Table Storage via sensors every 10 minutes. I want to display the results in a graph via Power BI.

My knowledge thus far suggests that Stream analytics only takes data from Event hubs or Blob storage. Is it possible to connect my azure table storage (in Azure storage explorer) to power BI and how do I do it?

I have tried uploading my table data into Power BI Designer and made graphs but it's obviously not in real time, which is what I'm after.

Any help would be so useful!

Answer 1

I recommend setting up Azure IoT hub as your main data receiver instead of directly inserting data into Table Storage. That way you can setup Stream Analytics to consume from IoT hub and output to Table Storage and PowerBI for a real time data feed.

Also IoT hub is designed specifically for capturing sensor information from devices and comes with many other goodies such as per device auth, bi-directional messages, and capacity for massive scale out.

Answer 2

Power BI support live data stream from Stream Analytics Hub. See tutorial here [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/stream-analytics-power-bi-dashboard/]

If you connect the data via table storage, then the only option is show the data every hour (via excel power query). You may not be able to live refreshes on anything related to Azure Storage (at least as of this writing). Currently there are no trigger available to know what has changed within your blob/table in real time. Alternate way would be to do Event Hubs -> Stream Analytics ->Azure Table. This way you will be able to store data into your tables but also pull data out of the stream analytics to display visualization on power bi. This comes in at higher cost as now you pay for both, event hubs and Stream analytics. And with your data coming in at every 10 minutes, it will not be worth paying 3 cents per hour for processing.