Optimizing the performance of a dashboard – Creating Dashboards

Optimizing the performance of a dashboard

The Power BI service includes the ability to diagnose poor performance in dashboards. The performance inspector will review the dashboard that has been created and make recommendations to increase the performance of the dashboard.

To open the performance inspector, click Performance inspector under the File menu when viewing the dashboard.

Figure 10.10 – Launching performance inspector from the File menu when viewing a dashboard

When the performance inspector opens, you’ll see items that are scored green, yellow, or red, as shown in Figure 10.11:

Figure 10.11 – Dashboard performance inspector findings

These scores will give you an indication of which items will have the most impact on the performance of your report. Under the NEED ATTENTION section be sure to review the performance inspector findings and make changes to your dashboard as suggested. Some common findings include the following:

  • Limiting the use of report tiles to one per dashboard – When multiple report tiles are used, the dashboard can show multiple pages of reports of live data and cross-filtering at the same time. This isn’t possible with reports, so it is not advised to do this on dashboards.
  • Removing the use of single-visual report tiles – It is possible to create a report with one visual and then pin that entire report to a dashboard. In this case, it is suggested to pin the visual rather than the whole page as this will remove the requirement for live interactivity back to the report data.

The Power BI service keeps data in dashboards up to date by keeping a cache of the data needed for the dashboard, which aids in performance. When data in the underlying dataset gets refreshed, the service will update this cache. It is also possible to force this cache to update by clicking the refresh button on the toolbar (upper right-hand side) when viewing the dashboard.

You can also set the service to automatically refresh the cache used for dashboard tiles by enabling automatic tile refresh in the dataset options and setting the refresh frequency, as shown in Figure 10.12:

Figure 10.12 – Automatic dashboard tile refresh settings

Once the automatic dashboard tile refresh is set, the service will handle updating the data cache used for dashboards, but users will still have the option to manually refresh if necessary. Remember that this will not impact report tiles, as data used for report tiles is always live, going back to the dataset of the report.

Optimized dashboards are a key ingredient to telling a story with data and make a Power BI solution useful from nearly any device at any location.