Monitoring OSD using the MDT Monitoring webservice and PowerBI Desktop #ConfigMgr

We are currently using ConfigMgr integrated with MDT to manage OS deployments. Recently I was tasked with creating a dashboard to display the progress of OS deployments. I was also recently inspired by a TechNet Wiki post where ECM MVP Raf Delgado has shared a powerful  PowerBI Desktop template for visualizing SCCM operational data (PowerBI Desktop can be downloaded for free). I figured why not use PowerBI to visualize the status of our OS deployments. At first I looked at writing some queries, which seemed like a tedious task, then I cam across this when doing some “research”, http://deploymentbunny.com/2013/12/09/nice-to-know-dumping-mdt-monitor-data-to-a-webpage-using-powershell/. Then the light bulb went off and since PowerBI is capable of pulling from a wealth of data sources I looked to see if it supports pulling data from web services, and sure enough! There is a source called “OData Feed“! I went to work on this initiative and produced a very simple dashboard showing the status of OS deployments. There is a lot of potential here, including linking this data with other data sources. As an example, imagine if you could pivot off of site information to see what your OS deployments look like across all your locations. You can follow the instructions below to try for your self.

1. Open PowerBI Desktop
   
2. Click on Get Data
   
3. Type OData in the search and select “OData Feed”
   
4. Click Connect
   
5. Type in the URL to fetch the data from the MDT web service. If your server hosting the web service is MDT01 then you would type in “http://MDT01:9801/MDTMonitorData/Computers”.
   
6. Click OK
   
7. I suggest you make some modifications to the dataset. You can do this by clicking “Edit”
   
8. First let’s rename it to “OSD Monitoring” by typing it into the Name field under properties in the right pane.
   
9. Next we need to translate the “DeploymentStatus” table to their associated status names.
   1. Select the “DeploymentStatus” column in the Query Editor.
      
   2. Convert the volume to text by clicking on the “Transform” tab and the click on “Text”
      
   3. Click on the “Transform” tab and click “Replace Values”.
      
   4. Using the following pairings below replace each number found with each respective status name.
      1 = Running
      2 = Failure?
      3 = Completed
      4 = Unresponsive
      
   5. It should now look something like this
      
10. Click on Close & Apply in order to utilize the dataset in your PowerBI report.
    
11. Expand the “OSD Monitoring” data set in the Fields pane to show a list of columns that can be added to your Power BI report.
    
12. Happy Visualizing!