Azure Data Catalog – The dashboard

Microsoft in the new - Custom visuals for Power BI

Back in July 2015, Microsoft announced the addition of custom visuals for Power BI.  They have since run several contests to encourage the community to develop and make available their own custom visuals.  There are now more than 80 visuals available.

As of March 22, these custom visuals are available for download in the Office store.

They haven’t all been onboarded yet, but they should all be available within the next couple weeks.  Once they are all there, you will be able to search for exactly what you need either directly, or by perusing the categories.

Azure Data Catalog – The dashboard

In my last blog post we looked at how to access the data catalog.  Now let’s look at the dashboard.  When you go to your catalog from the Azure portal as in my last post you will land on your Azure Data Catalog dashboard.

This is a cleanly designed dashboard with a few basic metrics about your data.  This one is very simple due to the limited amount of data I have loaded.  The first item located at the top of the dashboard is the register more data button

This allows you to complete another round of registration for an additional data source. This button conveniently takes you back to the Publish Your data now! Screen we talked about in an earlier post.

Below this are some Key Performance Indicators (KPis) about your data.  The idea of these metrics is to give you at first glance an overview of your entire Catalog as it currently exists.  As you add more data and make change and annotations to the data these metrics will change.

The middle of the dashboard covers the metrics of the assets in the catalog and who is using them, and how they are using them. The Top Tags highlight what is being made note of in the catalog and the top ways people are annotating the meta data.

The final piece of the dashboard displays what assets have the highest volume, which experts are listed most often and what the top sources of data are and what type they are. 

One of the better features of the dashboard is the search bar. 

This image does not do it justice.  What makes the search bar fantastic is that it is easy to find at the top of the screen in the center and you can do useful searches directly from your dashboard.  You do not have to go into the main body of the application to do a search.  The additional feature I love is that is saves my last few searches so I do not have to retype them.

My next blog will cover the toolbar at the top of the dashboard and the top of the application screen.