Power BI is Microsoft's take on Business Intelligence Platform. It comes with Power BI Desktop which is installed on Windows, stand alone, and is use to design your visuals and dashboard to get insight. Whereas, Power BI service is online service to host your dashboard to be viewed by others. The Desktop version is full featured and is free, while you need to subscribe to online service which is optional and only needed for sharing.

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Power BI lets you connect to data sources, such as Excel, CSV, Databases and many more, once connected it can query the data, clean the data and let you create visuals like bar charts, filters, pies and many more as desired. You click refresh to reload data from the data sources.

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Once Machine data is written to database, we use Power BI to get insights on these data.