Retrieve data from Cognite Data Fusion (CDF) in Power BI

7 min readDec 26, 2022

About Cognite Data Fusion (CDF)

Cognite is a SaaS provider, and Cognite Data Fusion (CDF) is our industrial DataOps platform product. We also offer subscription-based access to configurable business applications.

Cognite Data Fusion streams your data into the CDF data model where the data is normalized and enriched by adding connections between data resources of different types and stored in a graph index in the cloud. With your data in the cloud, you can use the CDF services and tools to build solutions and applications to meet your business needs.

With Cognite, you are the owner of your data. We use your data only to provide agreed-upon services. We handle your data securely, and we comply with privacy and legal regulations. If you leave our services, we make sure that you continue to have ownership of your data.

Introduction to Cognite Data Fusion (CDF)

Many organizations need to integrate and discover their IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) data to explore and resolve operational issues.

Cognite Data Fusion (CDF) streams your data into the CDF data model where the data is normalized and enriched by adding connections between data resources of different types and stored in a graph index in the cloud. With your data in the cloud, you can use the CDF services and tools to build solutions and applications to meet your business needs.

Organizations that are using Cognite Data Fusion benefit from:

· Significantly reduced time in data gathering and cleaning.

· Decreased cost of building, implementing, and scaling models.

· Auditable data that increases trust, helping experts cut time and costs.

The CDF data model and resource types

This unit will look at the CDF data model and the different resource types you can use to model and organize your data.

A data model is an abstract model that organizes data elements and standardizes how they relate to one another and the properties of real-world entities. The CDF data model collects industrial data by resource types that let you define the data elements, specify their attributes, and model the relationships between them. The different resource types are used to both store and organize data.

Resource types to store data

Most of the resource types in CDF are used to store different types of data. Let’s have a closer look at them:

Assets

We’ll start with the assets resource type. It stores digital representations of objects or groups of objects from the physical world.

Assets connect related data from different sources and are core to identifying all the relevant data to an object. All other resource types, for example, time series, events, and files should be connected to at least one asset, and each asset can connect to many resources and resource types.

Assets are typically organized in hierarchies. For example, a water pump asset can be part of a subsystem asset on a plant asset.

Time series

The time series resource type stores a series of data points in time order. Examples of a time series are the temperature of a water pump asset, the monthly precipitation in a location, and the daily average number of manufacturing defects.

Events

The events resource type stores information that happens over some time. Events have a start time and an end time and can be related to multiple assets. For example, an event can describe two hours of maintenance on a water pump and associated pipes or a future period when the pump is scheduled for inspection.

Files

The files resource type stores documents that contain information that is related to one or more assets. For example, a file can contain a piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) that shows how multiple assets are connected.

3D models

The 3D model’s resource type stores files that provide visual and geometrical data and context to assets. For example, we can connect a pump asset with a 3D model of the plant floor where it’s located.

Seeing asset data rendered in 3D is a great way to discover and find the data you are interested in. By rendering analysis results in 3D, you can better understand data, for example, by highlighting all equipment that had issues last year.

Sequences

The sequences resource type stores a series of rows indexed by row number. Each row contains one or more columns with either string or numeric data. Examples of sequences are performance curves and various types of logs, for example, depth logs in drilling.

Resource types to organize data

A smaller group of resource types lets you organize and define the relationships between the storage resource types:

Relationships

The Relationships resource type represents connections between resource objects in CDF. Each relationship is between a source and a target object and can be time-constrained with a start and end time.

One way to use relationships is to organize assets in other structures in addition to the standard hierarchical asset structure.

For example, you can choose to organize assets by their physical location or build a graph structure that allows you to navigate assets by mimicking their physical connections through wires or pipes.

Labels

With labels, you can create a predefined set of managed terms that you can use to annotate and group assets. You can organize the labels in a way that makes sense in your business and use the labels to make it easier to find what you want.

For example, you can create a label called pump, apply it to all asset resources that represent pumps, and then filter assets to see only pumps.

Data sets

A data set is a container for data objects and has metadata with information about the data it contains. Data sets group and track data by its source. For example, you can use the data set metadata to document who is responsible for the data, upload documentation files, describe the data lineage, and so on.

In Power BI, get data from Cognite Data Fusion (CDF).

Power BI is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization, or embed them in your app or website.

This article explains how you can use the Cognite Power BI connector to connect a Cognite Data Fusion (CDF) project as a data source in Power BI Desktop to query, transform and visualize data that is stored in CDF.

Use a CDF project as a data source in Power BI Desktop

To connect to a CDF project and use it as a data source in Power BI Desktop:

First, make sure that you have installed the March 2020 version (or later) of the Power BI Desktop. To automatically stay updated with the latest version, download Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store.
1. In Power BI Desktop, make sure that you sign in with your organizational account.
2. On the Home tab in the ribbon, select Get Data and then More. Then, in the Get Data dialog box, select Other and the Cognite Data Fusion connector.

4. Enter the CDF project that you want to connect to, for example, public data.

Optional: If the CDF project is on a custom cluster, set the CDF Environment to the URL of the API server for the cluster. If you’re not sure, leave the field blank.

5. In the Authentication dialog, select Organizational account and then Sign in with your organizational ID

Optional: If your organization is using API keys to control access to the CDF project, select the API key and specify the API key to connect to the CDF project.

6. Select Connect.