Did you know that with Power BI you can connect to GitHub and create a stunning dashboard, like this one:

Do you recognize it? It’s a dashboard about https://github.com/Microsoft/AL, which is the repo for developing extensions for Dynamics 365 “Tenerife” 🙂

How do I do this you might think? Well, it’s very easy, all you need to use is the GitHub content pack for Power BI:

These are the steps:

  1. Sign in to your Power BI account, at http://powerbi.microsoft.com.
  2. Then select Get Data at the bottom of the left navigation pane:
  3. In the Services box, select Get:
  4. Select GitHub > Get:
  5. Enter the repository name and repository owner of the repo:
  6. Enter your GitHub credentials
    (this step might be skipped if you are already signed in with your browser).
  7. For Authentication Method, select oAuth2 > Sign In.
    Follow the Github authentication screens.
  8. Grant the GitHub for Power BI content pack permission to the GitHub data.
    This connects Power BI with GitHub and allows Power BI to connect to the data.
    The data is refreshed once a day.
  9. After you connect to your repo, Power BI imports the data.
  10. You see a new GitHub dashboard, report, and dataset in the left navigation pane.
    New items are marked with a yellow asterisk *.

How cool is that! 🙂

Have a look at the punch card:

Apparently Wednesday is a top day to commit 😉

And you can learn more if you generate some insights:

for example:

Looking at this dashboard you can see the AL team at Microsoft is doing an amazing job!


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2 Thoughts on “Connect to GitHub (Microsoft/AL) with Power BI

  1. Marcel on November 11, 2020 at 13:51 said:

    This would be even greater if I could get data from a non-github repository.
    How can that be done? When I ask google for ‘power bi retrieve data from git repository’ all I get are answers related to github 🙁
    I want to retrieve data from a ‘local’ git repository

    • It depends, then you have to use a GIT api if that exists. Always ask yourself the question: if I had to do this in excel or on paper then how would I do this. Then try to find the PBI-connector that can import the data. I’m not sure that for a local git this would be possible.

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