Netbox - Reporting using Microsoft Power BI

[Victor Ververken]

Hello Guys,

I am struggling setting up reports using Power BI, I have tested the data import from Netbox to Power BI with two different methods :

- using API call from PowerBI - I am hitting there a number of result issue (1000) as even with specifying a 15000 limit result. I am not sure how I can handle pagination as from PowerBI side it's just a single web query.

- using direct connectivity to Netbox PostgreSQL database

> This solve the number of result limitation, all netbox DB is loaded into PowerBI.

> I am having an issue to filter the data as the database relationship for custom fields are not correctly recognized by PowerBI (all other relations are ok, a few of customfields, but not all). So then, when I try to do some reporting on sites or devices, I am not able to gather the associated custom fields, as the relationship between the two tables is not there.

I tried myself to set the relationship, but it is too complicated for me.

Is anyone already doing reporting with PowerBI or with an external tool using API or DB connection who faced and resolved similar issues?

Or is there any other import method to have Netbox reporting done with PowerBi?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Best regards,

Victor

[Brian Candler]

Pre-Netbox 2.10, handling custom fields via SQL joins is indeed very ugly, especially if you are using fields of "selection" type.

In Netbox 2.10, custom fields are much easier to work with: they are just a single JSON column in the relevant table (e.g. all custom fields for devices are in a single extra column in dcim_device).  Of course, this only helps if your BI system understands JSON.

Otherwise, it's up to you to extract the data - either via API or via SQL queries - and reformat it for the BI system to understand.