ALM Toolkit External Tool (with Christian Wade)

Hang out with us as Christian Wade walks us through the ALM Toolkit external tool for Power BI desktop. This schema compare tool for Power BI datasets is a fantastic application for lifecycle management (ALM) scenarios.

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[didierterrien]

Thank you Reid for the video and for mentionning Power BI Sidetools.
Sidetools doesn’t write back to the model in the published version but it does in the debug version. I need to add some logic in order to publish the feature.

[JulianPayne]

Hello Christian and Reid,

A few quick questions for you:

My organization wants to use ALM Toolkit to assist in our deployment pipeline automation process. With respect to automating this process:

Can we use the GUI in ALM Toolkit to deploy to multiple environments at one time (automate and control deployment to multiple environments using ALM Toolkit), or do we need to create a .almt file and use that with another pipeline automation tool?

Can ALM Toolkit update the parameters for an M Query Script via the GUI? If we were deploying multiple models to multiple environments, can we program ALM Toolkit to update M Query parameters as the models are deployed to different environments, or is best to use another Pipeline tool to manage this?
- We would want to update size constraints on our models ("All or Small" method), date ranges (RangeStart/RangeEnd), and Data Source Connection Strings (Dev, Test, Prod).

Can ALM Toolkit assist with automated refresh and incremental refresh, or is it best to use the PBIS tools for these processes?

What is the best way to integrate ALM Toolkit with Azure DevOps?
- It appears we could use .almt files and either .json model definitions or XMLA model definitions as scripts embedded (called) within our Pipeline processes. Just wanted to check this potential approach and see what is recommended for Pipeline automation and integration with ALM Toolkit.

Thank you very much for all the great work you and your teams are doing to make these solutions possible. I am searching other resources to determine if these capabilities exist, my experience with ALM has been for automated QA and Schema comparison, and fine grain manual deployment, so I am trying to determine how it can be used for broader deployment automation in our Pipeline process.

Best, Julian

[noahhadro]

when i use the ALM Toolkit external tool it opens the ALM Toolkit but the "Power BI Desktop" selection is greyed out. How can I fix this? Thanks so much for your help.