In the backend of security operations, one of the recurring challenges for security teams is automating Power BI dashboards to provide continuous, real-time insights from siloed data sources. While creating a dashboard from an Excel spreadsheet is straightforward, achieving automation from data collection to visualization involves a more sophisticated approach. This blog post delves into two prominent solutions for automating Power BI dashboards and explores the nuances of each, including authentication and data pipelines.
Security teams often work with data scattered across various systems, tools, and formats. To leverage this data effectively, they need a unified dashboard that provides continuous, real-time updates for executive reporting and efficient communication with other teams. Manual updates from Excel spreadsheets are not sustainable for dynamic environments where data changes frequently. Automating this process involves:
There are two types of solutions that enable teams to achieve this:
Leverage DTonomy’s automation platform to pull data from third-party sources, such as CrowdStrike, via their APIs. After transforming the data, write it to the Power BI web service via the API. This approach stores data directly on the Power BI service.
Instead of storing data on the Power BI service, this solution involves storing data in an intermediate data store such as Azure SQL. This approach provides flexibility in controlling the data and using Power BI or Power BI service to build your dashboard. You can leverage the built-in functionality within Power BI to transform or manipulate the data.
DTonomy’s automation platform provides out-of-the-box solutions for both approaches, enabling you to bring siloed security data to any data structure you prefer. Additionally, DTonomy can host Azure SQL for you, so you don’t need to worry about database management and related tasks.
Both SQL integration and API integration offer robust solutions for automating Power BI dashboards for security teams. The choice between them depends on your specific needs, infrastructure, and resources. SQL integration provides a reliable and scalable solution, while API integration offers real-time data updates with minimal infrastructure management.
By leveraging DTonomy’s automation platform, security teams can efficiently centralize and automate their data pipelines, ensuring continuous, real-time insights from their Power BI dashboards.
We are pleased to announce that DTonomy is now part of Stellar Cyber. The integrated solution will enhance cyber threat detection and response automation!