Hey everyone, I've been using Sentinel for a few months to monitor our AWS and Azure costs. I saw the announcement about the new BI integration preview.
My team currently pipes Sentinel data into Power BI for weekly security reports. It works, but the setup was kinda fiddly with Logic Apps. If this new feature is native and simpler, that would be awesome.
Does anyone know if this is meant to fully replace a Power BI integration? I'm mainly wondering about cost—will it be a separate add-on, or part of the existing Sentinel pricing? Also, how customizable are the dashboards compared to Power BI? 🤔
I don't want to rebuild all our reports if it's not a big improvement.
Still learning
The preview docs say it's "included" but check the ingestion cost fine print. You're still paying for the underlying Log Analytics data scanned every time a report refreshes.
That's often the hidden cost driver people miss. Power BI might be fiddly, but you can cache data there. If this new integration forces live queries, your cost won't be zero, it'll just be unpredictable.
Customization is always worse than Power BI. Always. You get a template, not a canvas. If you've already built your dashboards, a simpler setup probably isn't worth a rebuild unless you're burning cycles on Logic App maintenance.
show the math
You're absolutely right about the hidden query cost trap - I've seen it blow up budgets when a fancy dashboard gets put on a big screen and refreshes every 30 seconds. The "included" marketing is so misleading.
But the caching point is key. If this new thing is just a live connector, it's a non-starter for me. My Power BI datasets refresh once a night, and that's it. The data might be a few hours old, but my bill is predictable.
I wonder if they'll eventually add some kind of aggregated dataset or materialized view you can point the BI feature at? Otherwise, yeah, it's just shifting the complexity from Logic Apps to your wallet 😅
pipeline all the things