Using the connector

In order to use the OTbase Connector for Power BI, click on Get Data. In the search field, enter "otbase" and hit Enter.

Configure request parameters

In the following dialog, enter the parameters for your query:

Connection Protocol

For Connection Protocol, you have a choice between HTTP and HTTPS. Note that HTTPS will only work if you installed a certificate on your Windows machine that allows Windows to validate the SSL certificate of OTbase Inventory.

IP Address

Specify the IP address or hostname of your OTbase Inventory.

Data Types

The OTbase Connector for Power BI gives you access to virtually all data in OTbase Inventory. For most dashboards and reports you won't need all that data though. Therefore, in the interest of loading speed, you can select which data you want to use for the report at hand.

Devices includes the wealth of asset information, particularly details on specific assets, such as serial numbers, criticality, connectivity data etc.

Hardware includes hardware product data such as vendor links.

Software includes software product data such as obsolescence information.

Vulnerabilities includes information about known vulnerabilities that affect your installed base.

Note that you will also see hardware and (limited) software details without loading the hardware and software models. Therefore, in the interest of minimizing load time, it's suggested that you do a little bit of experimentation to find out if you need those other data items for the task at hand.

CVE Priority

If you want to do vulnerability analysis, here you can specify which CVE priorities you want to load (Critical, High, Medium, Low) again in the interest of reducing load time. Most users don't care about Low and Medium priority vulnerabilities. It's a bad idea though to exclude High priority CVEs as in OT, systems are often plagued with pretty old vulnerabilities that go back to a time when the Critical rating didn't yet exist. Therefore you can find lots of vulnerabilities with base scores of 10 that are rated as "High".

As a general rule, expect loading of CVE data to take a long time, and you don't want to make that time even longer by loading CVE data that you don't intend to process in the first place.

Location ID

You can limit the scope of your data to a specific location if that's all you focus on in the present report. Make sure to use the location ID, not the location name.

Enter access credentials

In the next dialog you will be prompted to provide access credentials for OTbase Inventory.

Note that depending on the account you are using, you may or may not be able to see the full asset information that's stored in OTbase.

Select data tables

In the following Navigator page, select the data tables you want to import.

Compliance

This table contains compliance information if you have defined policies in OTbase Inventory (WORFLOW/AUDIT). You can then use this data to create striking reports in Power BI.

Connections

The connections table contains connectivity information such as IP addresses, MAC addresses, and network ports. You will use it when you want to expose the IP addresses of devices, for example.

Devices

The Devices table contains the bulk of data about individual devices, similar to what you see in the device inventory in OTbase Inventory and in Device Profiles.

Hardware

The Hardware table contains data about hardware products. Several data items from this table are already contained in the Devices table, so you may only need this table for specific analyses.

Monitors

The Monitors table holds information about Discovery nodes and which devices they discover. This is more for diagnostic purposes.

Software

The Software table contains data about software and firmware products.

Tags

The Tags table holds tags that are associated with devices. If you want to expose device tags, you need to load this table.

Vulnerabilities

The Vulnerabilities table contains data about cyber vulnerabilities and their characteristics. If you are not interested in visualizing / analyzing those for the dashbord at hand you may want to de-select this table as it will usually incur significant load time -- often many minutes, as many hundred thousand vulnerabilities are not an exception for OT environments.

Build relationships between tables

Anytime you want to do more complex analytics with your OT asset data you need to establish relationships between the different tables. This way you can see, for example, which vulnerabilities plague a given device, or which software is installed on it.

All relationships start from the Devices model.

On the relationship page, link the Device ID field of Devices table with the Device ID field of the  other tables if those relationships haven't been created automatically already.

Set all relationships to Cross filter: Both.

Getting started with your dashboard

The simplest way to get started with your dashboard is to check if all the device data was loaded correctly by putting it in a table. All you need to do for this is to select the table widget and then, from the Devices table, select the fields that you want to show in that table.

As a next step you may want to bring in a histogram that visualizes the number of different device types. In order to do this, click on the bar chart symbol, then select the Type field from the Devices table, and also drag and drop the Type field into the Y axis field of the bar chart. This will result in something like this:

Now, if you select any of the device types in the histogram, the device table below will only show entries of this type.

In the following articles we will provide dashboard examples and strategies for specific use cases such as vulnerability management, obsolescence management, and compliance audits.