Power BI Components

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains several tightly integrated software and Microsoft-hosted components.

Power BI includes design and data modeling tools (left), hosted services and an on-premises server (middle), and client-side applications (right), which are used collectively to create and share reports, dashboards, and other forms of BI.

The central component is the back-end hosting platform, which queries data sources and delivers reports for users, and provides workspaces for organizing reports and controlling access by designers and administrators. It also supports hosting data models and providing scheduled data integration and transformation features.

Choosing the correct platform is key to meeting business requirements and controlling cost. However, choosing the best Power BI report hosting platform can be complex, as the platforms vary by supported features and no one platform provides all of the capabilities. There are also situations when a combination of required features is not supported by any one platform. A full analysis appears in “Choosing a Power BI Platform” on page 34 of the May 2019 Update.