Options for near real time dashboards/reports

[Greg_Deckler]

I have a requirement to display a Power BI dashboard or report on a screen in a factory. Basically, it will be showing stats for what is going on with the various machines on the factory floor. Needs to be near real time (minutes of delay or fine). 

I know that I can pipe the information up to something like an Event Hub, over to Streaming Analytics and then out to Power BI. Or something like a streaming analytics API route.

However, I'd prefer to connect using Direct Query to the on-premises SQL Server and simply "refresh" the report. Does anyone know of a native way to do that in Power BI or know of some other trick to do that?

Any other options anyone can think of?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but we have a similar dashboard in our company that I refresh using an automatic browser refresh plugin for firefox.

So you create your dashboard, upload it to service.

Open firefox, install the refresh plugin "Super auto refresh" and switch it to refresh every minute.

Go to your dashboard

Fullscreen the browser by pressing F11.

Blam, your dashboard will refresh every minute. However, the entire page refreshes, and because powerBI isnt the fastest site in the world, it might show a loading page more often than not. Refreshing less often is a bit better for this.

Is this what you meant?

[Greg_Deckler]

Yep, exactly the sort of thing I was thinking. Would be super cool if we could add javascript into a visual so that this would work in any browser. Thanks for pointing me toward a known solution, figured there had to be something out there for auto-refreshing a browser.