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Anonymous

Question

Marketo Analytics with Power BI Reporting?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
January 28, 2019
9 replies
12785 views

Has anyone had any success getting their Marketo data into Power BI using this out of the box integration? We went through all the steps documented in this Microsoft article, but we keep receiving Marketo notifications for web services errors.

It's the same error each time. Error code 606: Max rate limit ‘%s’ exceeded with in ‘%s’ secs. The number of calls in the past 20 seconds was greater than 100.

We selected the minimum amount of data -- it asks how many months to load, and we selected "1" -- and for fives days running it made anywhere from 23,000 to 43,000 API calls each day... but that never resulted in a working dashboard.

If we keep letting it grind along, will we eventually get reports? Or should we give up on this and build something on our own? (Or is there a way to modify it to avoid those errors and eventually get the data we need?)

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Ashley_Langfor2

Level 2

Hi Osman,

I tried using Power BI as well. It never worked. The only thing that it did was use all my API calls for one day. The only other thing I tried to sync was Google Anaytics and it worked but sadly Marketo never did.

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Anonymous

Thanks, Ashley! Yes -- that's all I've gotten out of it too. Chewing up our API calls.

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

+1, it blows.

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Mark_Price

Level 6

If this is the only thing you have connected to Marketo, it seems like Power BI does not respect Marketo's API limitations. Maybe try working with the vendor's support.

Haven't used Power BI, but I've been successful in extracting the data via custom code and the API:

http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/bulk-extract/

http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/lead-database/activities/#query

There may be solutions in launchpoint for the data extract.

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Anonymous

Yes. Good idea. Thanks, Mark! Going to reply on that documentation page and see if one of the contributors can't help us out.

We have some other things that are connected to Marketo, but those have predictable patterns and much smaller volumes of API calls, so I'm certain those errors are being caused by Power BI.

Rachit_Puri2

Level 5

Can someone please share some snapshots of dashboards that have been created using Power BI? We are currently exploring data dashboarding tools like Tableau, Qlik etc.

Ashley_Langfor2

Level 2

It sounds like nobody here was able to get it to work.

Dan_Stevens_

Level 10

I agree - the out of the box reporting/integration is bad. We use the API to extract data each evening to a separate data warehouse. And now have a very flexible environment (slowly phasing out our reliance of RCE, due to all its recent issues) to do both ad-hoc and real-time analysis. Here's a very small sample of our dashboards/reports:

And our custom "opportunity influence analyzer":

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Anonymous

Very cool, Dan!

So this is Power BI generating a dashboard from data stored in an Azure SQL Database?

What platform or tools do you use to extract the data while also staying below your Marketo instance's request limit?

Dan_Stevens_

Level 10

Yes it is (and yes, the data sits in an Azure SQL DB). The team doesn't even come close to exceeding our daily API limit (100,000) - probably averages a little over 10,000 per day. The team has done a great job in optimizing those calls to grab data as efficiently as possible. Our DB size is about 220,000 records.

Jonathan_Ng2

Level 2

Same here for us. Tried using Power BI a few times, once when it originally came out and again when they did a re-release with better integrations. In both cases, they timed out and could barely get connected. We went as far as opening tickets with both Marketo and Power BI and in both cases they circled back on each other telling us to work with the other vendor to resolve. We dropped it and ended up building a data warehouse/datamart collecting from various sources. We then throw it into Power BI if we want to conduct additional reporting.

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Anonymous

Very cool. Thanks, Jonathan!

It's a pity the connector doesn't work a bit better. A real bummer actually, because it gets your hopes up... but then... nope. Nothing.

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Barry_Dupont1

Level 3

Hi,

We are having the exact same issue, and I'm due in the next couple of weeks to look into a solution for this. If I find any simpler solutions (not too hopeful TBH!) I'll comment on them here, appreciate it if you can update this post with anything you find as well.

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Anonymous

Will do. I'm going to be posting something to the Power BI community about the issues with the connector and see if that won't draw some response from Microsoft.

I'll be sure to post here if we come up with some solution or make some headway on this.

Matthew_Wainwri

Level 1

Might be worth taking a look at Bedrock data here in Boston. We're friendly with them and they recently launched a product that allows you to feed data out of Marketo into an automated cloud data warehouse that you can use as a data source for PowerBI (or whatever).

It gives you tables you can point to directly from your PowerBI. It gets around the API uses by pre-loading the warehouse, and then bringing updates from there rather than continuously trying to pull data and hitting limits.

https://www.bedrockdata.com/fusion/marketo-data-warehouse

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Anonymous

Awesome! Another option to look at. Thanks, Matthew!

Matthew_Wainwri

Level 1

Surely. Hope it's what you're looking for!

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Anonymous

So, I posted my issue to the BI Community. I'd love it if anyone interested in the connector — particularly those who weren't able to get it working — would post behind me with whatever details they can provide about their issues and to express their interest in the connector.

There are a number of old threads (1, 2, 3) about the plugin, but the most recent updates to those threads are in September of 2017.

Adolfo_Correa

Level 2

A quick, temporarily workaround that worked for me:

In the "All People" System Smart List set a customized a view including columns you are interested in.
Set a daily subscription for the table to be sent to an email.
In Outlook, create a rule that downloads the .csv file and saves it to a Sharepoint file.
Connect PowerBi to that Sharepoint file.

This way I can export any column without restriction while I learn to deal with the API. I can also do it for any subset of the Database (smart lists). The VBA script is very simple, works on demand too.

Works ok so far. 30 min set up.