Best practise for developing dashboards

[Robertangi]

Hi eveeyone! My company had consultants that developed their dashboard but they are a nightmare to maintain. We are going to migrate it and was wondering for best practise. They created a pbix file with 10 reports -> publish to service -> pinned tiles to a global dashboard. Then for each local market(country) they used the same underlying reports -> put a filter on country and re-pinned everything to all 13 markets. Are there better/a more maintainable way to architecture this?

Thanks in advanced!

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Robertangi If each market should only see their information then it sounds like a use case for Row Level Security so that each market only sees their information. The implementation depends on what the requirements were. In terms of showing everything by market in the Dashboard, there is no filtering so this may have been the only approach.

What are your thoughts around migrating this? Moving that to a report level vs. dashboard?

[Robertangi]

Thanks @Seth_C_Bauer for the quick answer! The problem is that everyone from each market is allowed to see eachothers figures because they think it´s important for eg. Sweden to look at denmkars dashboard for comparison. The problem is the maintanence of the solution. 1 quick example being: They did a sum(example) / sum (example) and a tile showed "Infinity". When i downloaded the PBIX file -> changed the measue to a DIVIDE and used 0 as the alternate result and then re-uploaded the pbix file i had to go into the main dashboard -> click on the map to get to the report -> use a page level filter for eg. Sweden, repin that tile with the new filter -> redesign the dashboard for Sweden and then back to the main dashboard -> go the report -> filter on eg. Denmark -> repin and so on for all 13 markets. This just feels like a whole lot of unessecary manual work for such a quick-fix. The best solution imo would be to design the 10 reports in a pbix file, create role-based security and then as soon as someone from Sweden or Denmark logs in to their dashboard they would only see their country. Should i try harder to convince them that this is a better approach? 

Thanks again for your time, really appreciate it!

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Robertangi I can give a best guess based on the high level description of the approach/s I might take. If comparing countries is a requirement, then seperating things won't meet the overall goal.

In addition, changing the formula shouldn't have required a re-pin of the visuals... It should have adjusted to the new values after the tile refreshed (typically and hour after the report is updated).

If there are a bunch of different metrics on a dashboard, and you believe this update of tiles would be a headache, I would first try to pull things into the report level and create a dashboard type page.

For example, it would be extremely straight forward to have a slicer to just alter the cards/visuals and everyone can see the adjustments.

Alternatively, if all the numbers need to be displayed at one time, you could do that and not need to re-pin alterations to a dashboard.

Just brainstorming, but it seems to me you could use DAX and maybe a what if slicer to compare one region to another if that is the intent of the end users. I would be leary of just removing access, as it doesn't sound like that is a big deal. I would look for alternative paths to reduce the updates vs. seperating things into seperate files - as that approach will take a lot longer to recover from if a consolidated approach is what you have now.

[Robertangi]

Hi @Seth_C_Bauer. Thanks and thanks again for your answers. I am not new to Power BI but new to the community and i see that you are involved in answering almost every question so i was happy when i saw that you replied =). 

Thanks for your answers, i thought of either 1) RLS, 2) Design the report as a dashboard and pin live with a slicer in it or 3) Familiarize myself a little bit more with the what-if-scenario and try that approach out. 

Have a nice day!

// Robert