PowerBI – Using FreshDesk Web Services API

We started exploring the use of the FreshDesk cloud-based customer support platform.

Which is one of the modules of the FreshWorks Suite.

You can start off with a free subscription, which is good enough to start building your BI tool.

Once you are happy you can switch over to a paid subscription giving you extra features.

One of them is extensive reporting,

After exploring the Power BI integration. I found out that all of the third party solution provided did not work

And one of the solutions required that you have a Power BI Pro license…

.

.

SOLUTION :

So I ended up making my own Power BI Dashboard using the FreshDesk REST Web Services API.

See here for the API documentation : https://developers.freshdesk.com/api/

The Web Service API looks very straight forward and works with any REST compatible application.

Implementing this in Power BI, was challenging.

But as you can see here, you can do all you need in your Free Power BI Desktop too.

So this will save you some licenses money too

.

You can start off with a free subscription, which is good enough to start building your BI Dashboards.

Shows that Power BI is the right marriage for the 2 platforms, O365 and FreshDesk

In case you need to run this as offline data source or want to schedule reports.

You can also use PowerShell to extract the data, and use this as a data source, instead of the online data source.

This will save you quite some money uplifting your subscription.

Example :

If you have 25 Agents and you need to schedule reports. Your subscription is $19 / user / month more expansive.

This is a burden of an additional $5,000 subscription cost.

Other paid service provider is FreshInsights / Radiare

PowerShell

If you run the Invoke-WebRequest command against your URI in Powershell.

Like this :

$Data = Invoke-WebRequest -uri $URL -Headers $Headers -Method GET -ContentType application/json 

You can see in the response header information the API Version and the remaining calls you have

In this case 2996 out of 3000 per hour !

This is a limit set by Freshdesk to reduce the maximum API calls per hour.

Steps to get started using Power BI using the Web Service API :

1. create a free trial subscription

2. Copy your Web Service API Key

3. Open Power BI and do a Get DATA Web Data

Paste in the web service URL for Tickets for example.

4. Connect to FreshDesk using the API Key and password

PS : To use the Power BI Service and Scheduled REFRESH,

you need to use the Anonymous Authentication !

5. Next built your Queries and transformations to extract the data

6. Build your Visuals and Measures

Tips and Tricks

An EXTRA Bonus is that you can incorporate this in your SharePoint Online site.

No license needed see here on how to.

Schedule a Refresh using Power BI Service

This works now out of the box if you use the correct M syntax.

Second EXTRA Bonus is that now O365 has a Power Automate connector for Freshdesk as well :

Power Automate – Freshdesk O365 Connector available

Need to get started building your own interactive Dashboard, drop a message here.