Introduction

Microsoft Power BI is a great tool for creating dashboards and reports. Even better, Power BI Desktop is freely available. Anytime you want to do visualizations or analytics that go beyond the capabilities of OTbase Inventory, Power BI is therefore worthwhile exploring. The killer use case might be to create "CISO Dashboards" where you distill the data provided by OTbase into striking charts and metrics.

The major difference between Power BI dashboards and OTbase is that you can cross-link data and explore complex data sets with a couple of mouse clicks in a graphical manner. Power BI also allows you to create your custom user interfaces for your OT data, which may lead to a steeper learning curve for some users.

For example, consider the following dashboard that displays vulnerability data. It holds a lot of detail information in the tables to the right, and easy to interpret visuals on the left. Since it's fully interactive, users (analysts) can quickly get answers to their questions.

Vulnerability Management Dashboard

Believe it or not, but creating such a dashboard from scratch will take you little more than 30 minutes. The best thing is, it's fully interactive and you can really explore your vulnerability landscape.

The same is true for other aspects of your OT infrastructure such as obsolescence management, documentation of outdated software products, and more.

In the following example we explore compliance status. The slicer in the upper right corner allows us to select any of the defined policies within OTbase. The donut chart below shows the number of compliant vs. non-compliant devices for the selected policy, and clicking on either segment will limit the output to compliant or non-compliant devices only. The device table on the left displays affected devices, and a click on the profile link icon will launch the respective device profile in a browser window right out of Power BI for additional analysis.

The treemap in the lower right corner shows where affected devices are located, and the tags slicer allows the user to limit the output to devices with certain tags attached.

Compliance Dashboard

Again, consider that the development of a dashboard/report like this will take less than 30 minutes for any experienced Power BI user. The kicker is, all the data is already there -- loaded seemlessly via the OTbase Connector for Power BI.

While you can in principle move data from OTbase to Power BI without additional tools (by exporting to Excel tables as an intermediate format, for example), the OTbase Connector for Power BI greatly simplifies the job. It also allows for more complex analytics because the level of detail it provides goes beyond what you can export as Excel tables.

Video

The following video gives you an impression how easy it is to create impressive dashboards in Power BI once that you loaded OT asset data using the OTbase Connector for Power BI.