Low Code integration of RingCentral Analytics API with Microsoft Azure & Power BI

Getting data, especially analytics and storing them in the cloud for compliance, or executive reporting purposes is a common task. Quite a few RingCentral Developers are also Microsoft /Azure developers who often have to deal with this issue. In this article we will explain step by step how you can achieve the same without writing any code as you use the RingCentral Open Platform API and connect it to Microsoft Azure and Power BI systems.

As shown in the diagram above, there are two major buckets where information is stored and processed. The first step is to setup a RingCentral Developer Account with the right permissions if you don’t already have one.

Pre-Requisites:

1. Create / Login to the RingCentral Developer Console and make sure you have an application with Analytics permission if you don’t make sure to create one.

2. Have access to the Call Performance Analytics API and documentation, if not, you can Request Access to Analytics API Beta. Optionally as shown above you can get analytics data using the Call Log API however, this tutorial will focus on the brand new Call Performance API.

3. Microsoft Azure Subscription (or free trial)

4. Microsoft Power BI (optional for Power BI integration)

Once you have all the above in place, let’s start with with logging into the Azure Portal.

• We need to create Azure Data Factory (ADF) with a Pipeline and Storage Container (Azure Data Lake). ADF will consume the RingCentral API via ‘source’ and ‘sink’ that JSON resins into Azure Storage container. Follow this tutorial by Microsoft for detailed instructions.
• Once you’re done setting up ADF and Storage container, login to Azure Data Factory Studio and create a ‘Pipeline’ for making 2 HTTP POST Requests, one to setup authentication with the RingCentral Platform and the other two get the Call Performance Analytics Data. It will look something like below:

• After you validate and run the above Pipeline by clicking on ‘Debug’, you can then navigate to Azure Data Lake -> Container -> Directory -> JSON file and view the contents of the API Call. It will look something like below:

• In order to consume this data into Microsoft Power BI, we need to convert JSON into CSV and import and CSV file as Power BI is poor at dealing with JSON data, so follow steps here to create a new Pipeline in ADF to do just that. Once you have it will look something like below.

Lastly, if you have Power BI subscription, you can import the CSV file and render fancy charts as per your needs.

Hope this helped you, if you got stuck or have any questions/comments reach out to me over Twitter or put it in the comments below. To learn even more about other features we have make sure to visit our developer site and if you’re ever stuck make sure to go to our developer forum.

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