Integrating data onto Power BI from INSIGHTLY CRM

Hi Guys,
The other day I was looking at possibilities to get data from INSIGHTLY and visualize it through Power BI.
I was given the following link that lead me to the INSIGHTLY Developer portal,


and I came across the following article that showed how to directly connect the REST API to Power BI,


I followed the steps mentioned on the page associated with the link above and voila! it worked! However, the above article talks about "Displaying a time series using the Metrics API".

Let ma explain how this can be applied to get data from INSIGHTLY.
For this example, lets look at the steps required to get Project related data onto Power BI.

Pre-requisites

1. Access to INSIGHTLY. You can sign up for a Free 14 Day Trial.
2. Power BI Desktop.

Steps

1. Login to INSIGHTLY CRM > Navigate to the user menu and select User Settings.


2. On the User Settings Menu, navigate the menu on the left hand side and click on the User Setting


3. At the bottom of the User Settings Section you will find an API Key and Also generate one. (Copy that onto a notepad for future use)




5. Add the API Key onto the API Key text box and click on the arrow icon


6. Scroll down and select "Projects" on the menu on the left > Select "Gets a list of Projects" from the sub menu

7. Scroll down on the pane on the right and click on "TRY" under Test Endpoint


8. This will generate a Request URL on the dark grey pane on the right (Copy that onto a notepad for future use)



9. Open up Power BI Desktop > Select Get Data > Select Web


10. On the URL section, paste the Request URL (from step number 8) > click on OK



11. You will come to Menu that says "Access Web Content" > Select "Basic" on the menu on the left and insert the API Key (from Step 3) as the username and leave the password blank > On the "Select which level to apply this input" drop down, select the appropriate level (In our case lets apply it to projects only) > Click on OK


12. This will take you to the power query editor window



13. Click on "To Table" > This will open up a Menu. Keep the default values and click on OK




14. Once converted to a table, click on the icon and select the required columns and click on OK


15. You will now be able to view data on a tabular mode



16. You can do necessary transformations here and then "close and apply"



17. The data set will now be available for you to create a report




Like wise you can import other available data sets by selecting the relevant data you need from the INSIGHTLY developer portal and create your Power BI Data Model

Important Points to note

1. Data does not get automatically refreshed on Power BI Desktop when a new record is added. You will have to manually refresh it.
2. You may have reinsert the credentials as above on the Power BI Service when uploaded.


Hope this came in handy for those of you struggling to connect the INSIGHTLY REST API directly to Power BI!





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