Overview

Bazefield BI is Bazefield’s new visual reporting and dashboarding platform integrated directly within the Bazefield environment. Made to augment the existing dashboard and html driven custom reports within Bazefield, Bazefield BI further builds on visual analytics, driving deeper analytical insights through its visual report and dashboard layout engine.

Bazefield BI bridges the gap between traditional monitoring and analytics — offering a unified environment for data visualization, reporting, and decision support.

Training Material
These first few articles focus on the core concepts of the Bazefield BI Platform. Please continue to the Training Section if you are ready to create your first app!

Architecture Overview

Bazefield BI operates as part of the broader Bazefield Data Platform, connecting directly to your existing Data Engine.
It leverages Bazefield’s data model, including Points, attributes, events, allocations, cases, and work orders, as defined in the BI Data Sources module. It is recommended to read the sections about Bazefield Data Integration & Data Modelling prior to this set of articles for background context.

Key Components:

1. Bazefield Data Engine

Ingests and stores all real-time and historical data, calculations, and KPIs.
Backed by Bazefield’s proprietary time series historian, with Microsoft SQL and PostgreSQL warehouses for aggregated data, event data, and asset static data.
Provides the core data feeds for BI Data Sources.

2. BI Data Sources

BI Data Sources define which types of operational or analytical data are available for dashboards, widgets, and reports within Bazefield BI. They are collections of points, attributes, and other data that can be shared seamlessly across BI apps. Data sources also offer the inherit capability to make on-the-fly business calculations. These calculations are not points in themselves and are local only to Bazefield BI applications. They are meant to be quick transformations, scaling, or algebraic manipulations of other points or attributes in the same data source.

Bazefield supports multiple types of data sources within a BI app. As of version 11.5, the types supported are provided in the table below.

Internal Data Sources only
Currently Bazefield BI is limited to Bazefield internal data sets only, and must be used with the Bazefield Data Engine as the primary database & historian.

Data Source Type	Description
Points	Real time, or historical aggregated time series data attached to Bazefield Assets and Asset Models. Read more about points here…
Attributes	Static, key/value pairs of numeric or string data that describe an Asset and Asset Type in Bazefield. Read more about attributes here…
Availability Statistics	Custom defined rollups of lost production, theoretical production, actual production, and customizable availability definitions (time or energy based), derived from Bazefield allocations.
Events (Coming Soon)	Detailed event records such as stops, errors, or faults captured by the Bazefield alarm service.
Allocations (Coming Soon)	Synthetically derived categorizations of events for availability and performance reporting (specifically time and production based availability metrics).
Cases (Coming Soon)	Structured operational issue records in Bazefield — used to track, categorize, and prioritize follow-ups to events or allocations (or other manual occurrences on site) requiring investigation and resolution.
Work Orders (Coming Soon)	Field service activities and maintenance-related activity. Often a means to resolve a case.

Each BI Data Source can be version-controlled and linked to multiple dashboards or reports to ensure consistent reporting across the enterprise. This enables users to create one global source of truth business layer that can be shared across multiple reports, as an example.

Example of creating a simple business calculation in a data source

3. BI Apps

Bazefield BI Apps are the visual, end-user facing component of the BI platform. A BI app is comprised of one more “views” of the underlying data in the data source(s), each of which has one or more individual “widgets” displaying the data. BI Apps are designed in the BI Designer, which is a modular, grid-driven layout engine.

Bazefield BI Apps are classified as 1 of 2 “types”

Dashboard Applications: Focused on interactive visualizations for web-driven display. They include one or more tabular “views” composed of widgets that reflect real-time or aggregated data.
Report Applications: Designed for structured PDF Scheduled reporting. They generate documents (e.g., PDFs) based on predefined templates and schedules.

Example of a Bazefield BI Solar Analytics Dashboard

BI Manager

The Bazefield BI Manager is the primary management application for all Bazefield BI Apps and data sources present in a given installation. The Bazefield BI Manager enables users to:

Create and publish new data sources
Create and publish new apps
View prior versions of data sources & apps
Edit, delete, and clone apps & data sources
View authorship and modification dates
View active PDF report schedules attached to BI report type apps.

BI Manager enables global management of all apps and data sources installed in the system

Bazefield 11.5