Setting up Power BI to analyze email subject data

[lakwije]

I would like to use Power BI to analyze the alerts generated from our monitoring system. The monitoring system triggers emails when there is an issue with any of the devices. I am in need to find out how can I save the email subjects to a database so that Power BI can analyze the data. Any help is greatly appreciated. 

[MattAllington]

Do you need to save them?  Can’t you just connect to the Exchange server mailbox (get Data) and then load them from there?

[lakwije]

I could do that. Will I be able to dynamically update (realtime) BI dashboards when receving emails? Is that achievable? Thanks.

[v-yuezhe-msft · Accepted solution]

@lakwije,

Consider to push data from your source to Azure Event Hub and then you can send output of Azure Streaming Analytics to Power BI to create real-time dashboard. Or you can use Power BI REST API to send data from your source to push datasets and streaming datasets, then create real-time dashboard in Power BI Service. For more details, please review the following articles.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/stream-analytics/stream-analytics-power-bi-dashboard
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-real-time-streaming/

Regards,
Lydia

[stretcharm]

I've not be able to get access to your exchange server from powerbi

However I have an alert folder and I used export to dump a the messages to a csv file.

I then was able to process the messages including bits of the body and graph the times of various messages.

It's a bit manual to save the messages and can be slow if there are lots of them but it worked for adhoc analysis.