Dear ARIS Community,
we are currently exploring how to best leverage Power BI in combination with ARIS to enhance our reporting and analytics capabilities.
In particular, we are interested in understanding how others are working with:
- Accessing ARIS data (e.g. via API, exports, or intermediate data layers)
- Typical use cases (e.g. repository analytics, governance dashboards, process KPIs)
- Technical setups and architecture choices
- Limitations, challenges, and lessons learned
- Approaches to keeping data up to date (e.g. refresh strategies vs. near real-time)
We would highly appreciate if you could share insights into your way of working, examples of your Power BI dashboards, or your recommended best practices.
In addition, if anyone is open to a short exchange or meeting, I would be very interested in connecting directly to discuss experiences in more detail.
Our goal is to understand what works well in practice and how to set up a scalable and maintainable integration.
Many thanks in advance for your support and openness!
Kind regards,
Olaf
Alexander Cherednichenko on
Hi Olaf,
From our experience, one of the simplest and most maintainable ways to integrate ARIS with Power BI is to use ARIS Document Storage as an intermediate data layer.
A typical setup may look as follows:
An ARIS report/script is scheduled to extract the required repository data, for example, a process register, process statuses, ownership information, governance attributes, or other analytical data. The script then writes the result as a structured file, for example, JSON, into ARIS Document Storage.
Each subsequent execution of the script overwrites the same file. At the same time, the absolute link to the document remains unchanged. This makes it very convenient for Power BI, as the file can serve as a stable data source without changing the connection each time the data is refreshed.
On the Power BI side, you can connect directly to this file as a source and build the necessary dashboards on top of it. In many cases, no additional integration layer or complex API-based setup is required.
A practical advantage of this approach is that you only need a technical ARIS user with access to the relevant Document Storage location. As far as we have seen, this user does not need to consume an ARIS license, as the purpose is only to provide access to the stored file.