How can we connect PowerBI to our Orion DB for building dashboards in PowerBI?

From my understanding PowerBI has a connection option to use database as source and most users use that. Alternatively, some users have said you can export orion reports via csv onto a network share and then have PowerBI ingest csv data. But the db connection was the preferred route. The only information in separate databases is Log data and [NTA] Flow data. 

For historical tables, I would typically go for the views as opposed to tables. There is usually a view that will compile all the aggregated data (_detail, _hourly, _daily). For your example: [APM_ComponentStatus] (view). I like to use Solarwinds Platform Database Manager sometimes because it doesn't separate the views and tables like SSMS does. It makes it easier to identify if a view exists.

Connecting to the database directly, as we're on-prem, and then mimicking the views is the route that we are going. We do still create some custom tables in PowerBI directly based on the original DB tables we connect to so we can do more filtering for things, and the filtering in PowerBI reports only goes so far for our particular needs.

Connecting to the database directly, as we're on-prem, and then mimicking the views is the route that we are going. We do still create some custom tables in PowerBI directly based on the original DB tables we connect to so we can do more filtering for things, and the filtering in PowerBI reports only goes so far for our particular needs.