Reporting & BI Options
Enate gives you two complementary ways to get value from the data your teams generate:
Power BI Embedded Reporting built right into the product, and
the Azure Secure Endpoint, a secure access point onto the Enate Data Warehouse.
We recommend customers make full use of both to maximise the value of their operational data and management insights.
π‘Summary: Use Power BI Embedded for day-to-day operational dashboards inside Enate, and the Azure Secure Endpoint for executive-level MI that you blend with data from other sources in your own warehouse.
Introduction
In line with Enate's architecture, and with the Enate product residing within Microsoft Azure, comes the ability to provide customers with advanced management information and reporting options:
π Power BI Embedded reporting - pre-built Power BI reports within the product itself, letting your teams report on their operations and develop further reports for themselves, all within the familiarity of Power BI, inside Enate.
π Azure Secure Endpoint β a highly secure warehouse access point for customers to extract data for their own hosting and blending of management information and reporting.
Delivering both operational data and management insights is proving hugely powerful for existing customers, helping them make the decisions that drive their businesses forward.
The two solutions at a glance
π Power BI Embedded
π Azure Secure Endpoint
Used by
Team Leaders, Team Members, Ops Managers
Senior Management, Board Packs, personas who are not Enate users
Frequency
Hourly / daily / weekly
Less frequent - e.g. monthly packs, steering group dashboards, quarterly business reviews
Purpose
Dashboards to help steer operations across teams
Exec-level MI blended with other data sources
Data scope
Enate-only operational data, no need to blend with external sources
Data retrieved into your own warehouse / lake using your ETL tools, via URL and secure credentials
Refresh
Built-in, scheduled
Supports delta retrieval of only changed data
Permissions
Enate permissions automatically applied to dashboards
Permissions and data access owned and applied by the customer
Self-service
Teams can build and share their own dashboards
Customer builds their own downstream reporting
What should go where?
Use this decision view to work out which solution fits a given reporting need.
Azure Secure Endpoint - how it works
The Azure Secure Endpoint is a secure "window" through to the full Enate Data Warehouse. Your team logs in from approved IP addresses using a secure URL and credentials, then uses your own ETL tooling to retrieve data into your warehouse, where you can blend it with non-Enate sources and feed your own reporting solution.
Azure Secure Endpoint - Setup Steps
Setting up the endpoint is a collaborative process between Enate and your team. The steps below run in sequence.
π‘οΈ Security note The endpoint only accepts traffic from the IP addresses you provide, and credentials (URL, username, password) are shared securely, with the password delivered separately from the URL and username.
Azure Secure Endpoint - FAQs
How do customers connect to the Azure Secure Endpoint?
You provide the IP addresses that will be used to consume data from the Enate Secure Endpoint. These are applied to the endpoint on the Enate side so that only those addresses can access it. Enate then provides the URL, username and password (the password supplied separately) for your tool of choice to extract the data.
What data can be ingested from the Azure Secure Endpoint?
The endpoint is a window through to the full Enate Data Warehouse, so all warehouse data is accessible. Enate publishes the Data Warehouse schema for each product release. See the Enate Data Dictionary.
How do updates to data work?
This is a question for your data architects. Existing customers typically use an ETL tool (Extract, Transform & Load) to securely log into the endpoint and retrieve the required data on a periodic basis into their own repository. The level of transformation needed is your decision, to fit your target solution.
What volumes of data are involved in the transfer?
This varies by customer, depending on the size of the Enate Data Warehouse and its rate of growth. The Enate team can provide existing numbers, but it's the customer data team's role to ensure the customer-side solution is scalable enough to meet growth demand.
What is the frequency of updates?
This is a design decision for you. Typically, existing customers retrieve delta updates up to six times per day, depending on their use case.
What is the extent of Enate support for this solution?
Enate owns and supports the Enate core platform, the Enate Data Warehouse and the Azure Secure Endpoint solution. This extends to High Availability of the Data Warehouse for disaster recovery purposes. The endpoint is an Azure service available in the primary and secondary regions, ensuring resilience in the event of a regional issue. In the unlikely event of an extended Azure regional issue, customers would need to repoint their reporting solution to a new endpoint in the secondary region, which Enate would communicate.
The solution to extract data from the endpoint and all downstream solutions are the responsibility of the customer.
Where is the data held, and whose responsibility is it?
Data in the Enate Data Warehouse is hosted within the Enate Azure tenant, and Enate is responsible for maintaining, supporting and securing that data. For data retrieved by customers from the Secure Endpoint, responsibility (including the hosting solution, security and data residency) sits with the customer.
Responsibility split
The below diagram shows the split of operational responsibility across the Azure Secure Endpoint and downstream Customer BI stack.
Related links
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