Connect Power BI to IXON Cloud for advanced machine analytics

At IXON, we strongly believe in the power of integrated solutions and the KISS principle. That’s why, besides VPN and industrial remote access, we offer Cloud Logging dashboards for easy machine data visualisation. However, each use case has its own desires, issues and approach.

IXON Cloud is a great solution for many situations, but we do recognize that some use cases may ask for a different approach. We’re happy to announce that one of our integration partners has successfully integrated IXON Cloud with Microsoft Power BI, which is part of Office365. This allows you to move data from your industrial equipment, via IXON Cloud to Microsoft’s popular business intelligence tool.

Collect with Cloud Logging, analyse with Power BI

With IXON Cloud Logging you can quickly and easily gain insight into your business operations. When Cloud Logging is enabled, this data is automatically read from the PLC, collected and transferred to the IXON Cloud and displayed on crisp dashboards. Although Cloud Logging is very fast to implement, some companies may have needs that Cloud Logging does not fulfil.

Combine multiple data sources in Power BI using the IXON API

Imagine, for example, you want to aggregate, merge and enrich data from multiple data sources. These can be external sources like demographic statistics (weather, traffic, etc.) and economic statistics (from banks, CBS, etc.). Or internal sources like CRM, ERP, planning and production systems. Although this goes beyond what Cloud Logging offers, we do facilitate this through our open platform API. This way you determine which data is imported and how you want to visualize it.

Let Power BI do what it does best: IoT data analysis

In Power BI it’s extremely simple to combine all these internal and external data sources into valuable insights that support decision making. Power BI excels at data manipulation, processing and visualisation and provides users with additional ways to visualize their machine data, offering new insights into the data that we extract from your machines.

In Microsoft Power BI, reports are developed with the free application Power BI Desktop. With the Power BI for IXON connector, your IXON data is imported into Power BI. You can ensure it’s always up to date with automated, incremental refreshes. Power BI Desktop enables you to develop deep, actionable insights for a broad range of scenarios.

Data can be stored both locally and in the Microsoft cloud. When using Power BI, data dashboard visualizations no longer have to be set up by your IT department, but can be done by people on the shop floor. By default, Power BI offers 32 built-in Visuals for visualizing your data in different ways. But in the Power BI Store, you can buy many more from third-party providers.

How can I connect IXON Cloud to Power BI?

As you may know, IXON is an open platform with a powerful API, which you can use to extract all desired data from our cloud and feed it into any system you want. IXON's partner StriData has created the Power BI IXON connector to effortlessly analyze your machine data in Microsoft Power BI. The connector handles all the communication with the IXON API. No programming or API knowledge is required.

If you’d like to use Power BI for IXON you can get in touch with our integration partner StriData (info@stridata.com), web: https://stridata.com/ixon/ They will be more than happy to consult you.

If you’ve got questions about the possibilities of IXON Cloud and data collection, please contact IXON.