One Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub

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In this post I want to cover creating one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub. Because I covered it in a session recently.

In a previous post I covered using Azure DevOps Analytics Views and Power BI to create Sprint review dashboards. During that post I showed how you can use Analytics Views within Azure DevOps to get data from Azure Boards for Power BI reports.

I intend to extend the functionality in this post. To show that you can have both Azure Boards and GitHub data in the same report.

To clarify, Azure Boards is the service that you use within Azure DevOps to manage your work items.

Why one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub?

In reality, there are a view reasons why using one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub can be useful.

For example, if your existing repositories are in GitHub and you have decided to use Azure Boards to manage your work items.

Now, I know that GitHub recently announced GitHub Issues and people are keen to use it. However, it is still in preview at the moment and there is a waiting list for it.

In addition, Azure Boards is still considered to be rich in features. Plus, you need it to take full advantage of Azure Test Plans.

How to create one Power BI report

In order to get data from GitHub into Power BI desktop I first created a new page and called it ‘GitHub’. From there, I selected ‘Get Data’ and then ‘More’.

In the get Data Window I searched for GitHub and selected ‘GitHub (Beta)’.

Because the GitHub connector is still in preview in Power BI, I had to click the ‘Continue’ button in the below window.

Afterwards I entered the GitHub repository details.

Once I clicked ‘OK’ I got asked to sign into GitHub.

So, I signed into GitHub and then clicked on ‘Connect’. From there I was asked what data to select.

Because a popular request is to see what commits were done as part of work items in Azure Boards I selected ‘Contributions’. Due to the fact this shows the committed data.

However, as you can see below you can select other things from GitHub as well. For instance, issues and milestones. With this in mind, I selected them as well.

After I clicked ‘Load’ the data was available for use in my report. Once loaded I am now able to select data from both GitHub and Azure Boards for use in one report.

For example, the below fields available shows the contributions, issues and milestones data from GitHub. In addition, the two Analytics Views from Azure Boards relating to Tasks and Backlog Items that I used in a previous post.

Doing this allows me to use one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub. To highlight this, I quickly created the below example.

Improve your Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub

Of course, you can improve on this Power BI report to suit your needs.

For instance, I can extend the functionality further if I use the Model section in Power BI desktop to build relationships between the data from both Azure Boards and GitHub. Doing this allows me to use the data from Azure Boards and GitHub together in rich visualizations.

In reality, you will likely have to transform data as well for this to work. For instance, changing usernames in one of the sources to match the other. However, you get the idea.

Final words about one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub

I hope this post is a good introduction on how you can use creating one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub. Because I know a lot of people are looking to use data from both of them together for various reasons.

Of course, if you have any comments or queries about this post feel free to reach out to me.