Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights. It has dashboards that provide a 360-degree view of the business with the most important metrics in one place, updated in real time and available on any device. The Power BI service publishes reports securely to your organization and sets up automatic data refresh so that everyone has the latest information. Interactive visualizations, dashboards, reports, and datasets are some of the tools in the Power BI collection:

Power BI dashboards are interactive dashboards and visualizations that can be created and updated from many different data sources in real time. One can create apps that integrate with a Power BI dashboard in real time, including Dynamics 365, using any programming language that supports REST calls.

Power BI has several components that make up a full Business Intelligence (BI) suite:

• Power BI (service):
  • Unify all of your organization’s data, whether on the cloud or on the premises and publish reports securely to your organization with automatic data refresh for everyone to access the latest information
  • View and share dashboards across your organization, and connect to pre-built reports from experts
• Power BI Desktop:
  • A feature-rich data mashup and report authoring tool available as a Windows desktop app
  • Connect and transform data, create advanced calculations, and build stunning reports in minutes
• Power BI Embedded:
  • Create impactful and interactive data visualizations against your application data in Power BI Desktop, without writing any code
  • Easily explore application data through a free-form drag-and-drop canvas and produce rich data models using formulas and relationships
• Power BI Mobile:
  • A mobile app for all the major mobile platforms to view Power BI dashboards at your fingertips, no matter where you roam or with which device
  • Native apps provide live and interactive mobile access to your important business information
  • Integrate a Power BI tile or a report with an app with an IFrame HTML element
  • You can create a custom mobile app to display real-time Power BI tiles and reports on the user’s mobile device
• Power BI gateways (on-premise):
  • Integrating helps you deliver your solutions faster while focusing on your core value
  • A gateway keeps the data fresh by connecting to on-premise data sources, without the need to move the data
  • Large datasets can be queried easily
  • Data transfer between Power BI and the gateway is secured through Azure Service Bus with encrypted credentials
  • Enterprise gateway is an option to serve large groups of users to refresh on-premise data sources
  • For data sources other than Azure connections that use DirectQuery, an Enterprise Gateway must be installed and the data sources must be registered to establish a data connection
• Power BI real-time streaming:
  • Stream data and update dashboards in real time with inbuilt connection with Azure services.
  • It is useful for devices and sources of streaming data, such as factory sensors, social media sources, service usage metrics, and anything else from which time-sensitive data can be collected or transmitted. For example, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), wherein systems, solutions, and humans all interact with each other.
• Power BI REST API:
  • It gives the power to use Power BI in any mobile app, web app, or client application
  • Open standards-based REST API to integrate your application or service with Power BI
  • REST API calls are made on behalf of an authenticated user by passing a token in the Authorization header
• Power BI publisher for Excel:
  • Save snapshots of important PivotTables, Charts, cell ranges, and more across all of your Excel spreadsheets to a Power BI web dashboard with just a few clicks

Let's now explore some Power BI interactive dashboards and visualizations where users can create personalized dashboards to monitor the organization's most important data. 

A dashboard combines on-premise and cloud-born data in a single pane of glass, providing a consolidated view across the organization, regardless of where the data lives. Each metric or insight is displayed on the dashboard as a tile.

We'll now share some readily available capabilities in Power BI:

• Out-of-the-box dashboard from Power BI along with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition for retail business area. The following visual  showcases various metrics in different visualizations, highly interactive and connected with each other:

• Power users can also use a simple Q&A in Power BI to come up with interactive visualizations, by enabling the capability as shown below:

• You can ask a query, for example, sum actual by company by period, and it will give you the following visual for your business data in focus:

• Another out-of-the-box dashboard available as services from Microsoft Power BI is for the financials area, which is shown in the following screenshot with various KPIs and analytics:

• Another out-of-the-box dashboard available as services from Microsoft Power BI is for the cost management area, which is shown in the following screenshot with various KPIs and analytics:

Apart from using the available services, you can quickly create a financial dashboard using OData, comprising a couple of data entities from Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition and built in no time:

Let's now explore the variants and pricing of the aforementioned variants in Power BI.