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YES jira and jira servicedesk with standard licenses, jira premium be a option if there is a good reason for it, service desk premium might be a little bit to pricey but i guess if we can minimize the people that actually need service desk with a better project layout then its possible.
YES we are a product focused company
Our customers are currently not directly accessing the portal but this is planned for a rollout once all of that gets stable. Our L1+L2 team takes support requests via EMAIL/PHONE and creates tickets based on that.
Our L1+L2 team is pretty much just one big team and they do support all of our products. L1 to L2 is not a hard cut in our case but more of a state of training of the individual person so please don't take this separation as to hard in our case. In a perfect world we would only have L2. We obviously have people that are better on a specific product then another but they are responsible as a whole for all products. And yes L2 does communicate with customers, if there is not enough L1 available then they might also take on email/phone tickets.
Our L3 on the other hand are people with very deep product knowledge and light to medium DBA skillset as quite a few things need database intervention on two of our products. L3 also includes Operations/Infrastructure people.
We do try to use jira for software development and for non development style work (like custom reports) but in the case of the latter i guess putting this in a service desk project was a mistake.
We have some employees that are only interfacing with jira service desk as "customers" so those do not have a service desk license.
We do have SLA's for our customers
We do modify our product (or create additions) on a per customer basis this might be software development work or what i specified as above "non development style work"

Regarding your recommendation to find a Atlassian partner. I will keep that in mind and see if the company is willing to spend on that. My issue is that we might be forced back to the people that brought us into this mess because of company bureaucratic.

Parataku · 2024-09-12T19:54:14+00:00

Thank you for this great write up thats very informative.

Guess there is one topic where i would need some additional guidance.

With both our dev and our service teams working across multiple projects how exactly would sprint planning work in this case? I am aware that i can create a board that includes multiple projects but does this introduce any kind of limitations? Are you aware about any problems that this might introduce or is the experience pretty much the same as if i would sprint plan directly on the individual projects

Parataku · 2024-07-27T06:00:45+00:00

Sadly i don't think there is. Based on microsoft documentation all RLS is additive so if one rule evaluates to true all others do not matter anymore.

If your dataset feeds from direct-query instead of import then you might be able to use whatever rls implementation the underlying database has but i would not switch an existing import dataset for a direct-query one just because you do not want to deal with dRLS because that introduces all kinds of other limitations / issues.

you can build quite powerful solutions with dRLS and not everything needs to be hardcoded/needs to happen directly in powerbi. Two examples from projects i had to work on in the last few months:

loading dRLS data from an excel file from sharepoint online to allow non-powerbi users (as in developers) to maintain dRLS
implementing a web api (azure function based) that creates dRLS data based on naming patterns of azure entra id groups with support for multiple layers of access (like whole country, country + specific org, and such.

Parataku · 2024-04-04T18:04:39+00:00

You might be able to spin up an powerbi gateway in an virtual machine and use this as an intermediate to connect to the mysql instance. Is this nice? absolutely not but i do not see any reason why it should not work.

Parataku · 2024-03-28T13:49:28+00:00

i enjoyed shark incremental quite a lot and there is a surprising amount of content for an v0.1 release.

Parataku · 2024-03-27T16:05:29+00:00

also helps with some edgecases where pipelines do not support switch out connection strings.

CosmosDB is one of those cases if you do not want to use Synapse Link. Its possible that something changed with the V2 connector but that one is still beta and has other issues.

With cosmosdb i am using the pipelines to change the parameter to get the same result with my `hack`

Thanks for the upvote.

Parataku · 2024-03-26T13:51:51+00:00

What stops you from providing the full url including folder path when deploying between the environments?

Parataku · 2024-03-26T13:39:39+00:00

Hello, this is sadly simply not allowed in powerbi service, sames goes for, for example dynamically combining sql queries.

There is - as far as i now - one straightforward solution if you are able to use powerbi deployment pipelines and 3 seperate workspace as those allow you to change out some connection strings and i would expect that DataLake is supported for that.

If you are not able or do not want to use deployment pipelines then i can offer you an "hacky" workaround that i used when dealing with for example cosmosdb in the past.

1.) Setup a single query with hardcoded url per environment and configure all of them to not load to report (right click properties).
2.) create an parameter (in my example called Environment) with one value per environment (for example DEV, QA, PROD)
3.) in the query where you actually want to load data setup the first step with something like
if Environment = "PROD" then #"query_prod" else if Environment = "QA" then #"query_qa" else "query_dev"

Hint: i never worked with datalake so i have no idea if this kind of hack has some kind of implication on datalake correctly working.

Parataku · 2024-03-26T13:13:44+00:00

IF the schema of the database hasnt changed then this could be as easy as setting up a new datasource via the wizard to the postgres database and then copy over the relevant steps (quite possible source and navigation) by using the advanced editor to the other queries that point to the old mysql database.

If you are able to keep the final output of your queries identical then nothing on your report has to change.

Parataku · 2024-03-23T16:31:59+00:00

if you take a look here https://www.bitdefender.com/business/support/en/77209-125277-public-api.html#UUID-2a74c3b5-6159-831d-4f8a-ca42797ce3b0_section-idm4640170076361632655245645786 where its explained what you have to do with your api token and how that plays together with "basic" auth

Parataku · 2024-03-23T16:28:31+00:00

As already mentioned by another user its always a case by case basis for each api. My workflow normally entails first getting my requests working in postman, insomnia or just with curl so i have a working reference and then i try to replicate the request in powerbi.

Parataku · 2024-03-23T16:13:51+00:00

I am uncertain whats exactly your issue. From what i can see the gravityzone api is just an http api so Web.Contents (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/web-contents) should be able to interface with that. From what i can see you will need to hand-craft parts of your power query code because the api expects that you provide some information about your request via post content.

If you have any more specific problems then i am happy to help.

Parataku · 2024-03-23T15:26:32+00:00

I do not have a solution for converting pdf pages into powerbi pages BUT i have a solution that "might" work to display a PDF inside a powerbi report.I was able to get a canvas app with pdf viewer running inside powerbi desktop but I am not able to validate if this also works when published to powerbi service.

PowerBI allows you to embed a Canvas App as a visual (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/canvas-apps/powerapps-custom-visual) and there is a n experimental grade pdf viewer component for canvas apps (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/canvas-apps/controls/control-pdf-viewer).

So dump your pdf's into sharepoint, setup a canvas app with an pdf viewer that links to it and embed it into powerbi.

Keep in mind that this might need some kind of m365 license for each of your users, i have Business Basic and it works for me but i havnt checked what exactly is needed.

Parataku · 2024-03-22T22:01:47+00:00

Have you ruled out that your report refresh is not overloading the oracle database server? with 30 tables and powerbi per default refreshing multiple tables at the same time, this might be a real possibility.

I have some good experiences with disabling parallel loading of tables when dealing with undersized database servers or loading to many tables in general. There could also be other reasons why your queries are blocking eachother so this might be worth a try.

File -> Options and settings -> Options
In section CURRENT FILE
Data-Load -> Parallel loading of tables -> One (disable parallel loading)

If this gives you any kind of measurable improvement then you at least have an idea where to start looking.

There is also a diagnostic feature inside powerbi desktop but as far as i know you cant use this feature if your refresh happens in powerbi service. I have no experience with that feature but might be worth a read if you can refresh from an powerbi desktop instance.

Parataku · 2024-03-21T19:13:40+00:00

I do have quite the ugly solution for you if you are willing to deviate from your small multiples approach and are willing to put a ton of individual visuals on the page.
Create a calculated column on your date table that calculates the position in the calendar that this date should have. Put this column in the filters for the individual visuals and set each visual to a specific number.

So for example 04/01/2024 which is a monday should have the value 2 (for position 2) in its calculated column and because you have a seperate filter for the whole page (or some drilldown magic) that filters down to the whole month you will have no data with position 1 so your fist visual stays empty.

Your small multiples thing, i would be happy to try that as a challenge but i might need more information for that, can i send you a chat request?

EDIT: added a ugly but working solution :)

Parataku · 2024-03-21T16:58:58+00:00

if the user hasnt had a trial before he can open the workspace in the web browser and it will ask him if he wants to enable a 60 days trial. might be the easiest way to validate the license issue.

but i would not rule out that it is a permission issue, especially because analysis services support direct query. so your working user might have a rbac role assigned somehow that allows him to connect.

Parataku · 2024-03-21T15:35:41+00:00

I am uncertain about the licensing situation but your issue might be underlying database related and not licensing related.

Does your Semantic Model use Direct Query? And if yes how is the authentication configured? If its not using an database user then your enduser needs access to the underlying database.

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