Synoptic Panel v1 Retired (10 Apr 2026): Every Alternative Compared

OKVIZ rewrote Synoptic Panel from scratch as v2 in 2024 and deprecated v1. Its July 2025 announcement said v1 would "cease to function on March 10, 2026"; the retirement then moved a month, and OKVIZ's documentation now states: "v1 has been retired on April 10, 2026." After that date the visual "will no longer work in your reports and you will see messages indicating that the visual is not available."

You can tell which version a report uses from the About section of the visual: v1 reports version 1.5.0 and, in editing view, shows a warning icon saying the visual is unsupported. Maps built for v1 are compatible with v2, but OKVIZ is explicit that you cannot simply swap one visual for the other: "you will need to reconfigure the visual settings and re-import the maps."

If you no longer have the SVG files that were embedded in the old visual, OKVIZ's Synoptic Panel Toolbox can extract them from the report, "regardless of the version of Synoptic Panel". Do that first, before you remove anything, because the map is the only part of the old visual that carries over to any of the alternatives below.

Six options cover the field. The short version, then the detail:

1. OKVIZ Synoptic Panel v2 (full): the direct successor. Free tier limited to one local map and 15 matched data points; paid licences from OKVIZ or AppSource. Not certified, because it can load external maps. Publish to web, Embedded and Report Server only with an OKVIZ licence.
2. OKVIZ Synoptic Panel Lite: a certified subset of v2 on the Microsoft Marketplace. No remote maps, no Publish to web, Embedded or Report Server, because the AppSource licensing model does not cover those scenarios.
3. Deneb: free, MIT-licensed, Microsoft-certified visual that renders Vega and Vega-Lite specs. It works "anywhere your Power BI report does, including publish to web, on-premise with Report Server, and mobile." You supply the region geometry as data and write the spec yourself.
4. DAX SVG measures: no custom visual at all. A measure returns an SVG string shown as an image in a table, matrix or the new card visual. Zero install risk, but regions are not clickable and you redraw the whole image per row.
5. Icon Map Pro: a commercial map visual for geographic data (custom basemaps, polygons, H3 hexagons). The right tool when your "panel" is really a map with coordinates, the wrong one for a floor plan.
6. VizForge Synoptic Studio: upload the image, let the AI detect regions or trace them, and download a standalone .pbiviz built from a fixed synoptic template. One-time credits, no per-user licence, no per-seat cap on data points. Uncertified, like every .pbiviz you build yourself.

For most v1 users this is the least-effort path, because the authoring workflow (Synoptic Designer, area binding, label designer, colour rules) is the one you already know, and your old SVG maps load into v2.

What changed is the commercial model. OKVIZ's versions page lists the free tier limits as "maximum a single local map per visual", "only the first 15 data points are matched with the map areas, the others are ignored", and no Power BI Embedded (which OKVIZ defines to include SharePoint, Publish to web and PaaS embedding), Report Server or national clouds. On 4 November 2026 the product page listed user licences at $49 per month for 20 users ($2.45 per user), with per-capacity and per-site options for Embedded scenarios. A free trial is available on the Marketplace listing.

Two facts matter for governance. First, the full v2 is not certified: the Marketplace listing says it "is not certified by Microsoft, as it allows external maps to be loaded, which is not allowed to certified visuals." If your tenant enforces "Add and use certified visuals only", the full build will not render unless an admin adds it to the organizational visuals store, which Microsoft documents as overriding that tenant setting. Second, there is a certified edition, Synoptic Panel Lite, but it drops remote maps and the Embedded scenarios, and OKVIZ states that Lite does not support Publish to web.

Choose OKVIZ v2 when you have many maps, rely on its map hosting ("My Storage"), need multi-level drill between floors, or your organisation is comfortable with a subscription. Choose Lite when certification is non-negotiable and your maps are embedded and small.

Deneb is the strongest free answer when Publish to web is the requirement that broke your v1 report. It bundles all of its libraries, carries no licence check (Microsoft lists "license enforcement for custom visuals" among the things Publish to web does not support) and is certified, so it renders in Publish to web, Report Server and mobile, and survives PowerPoint and PDF export.

The cost is authoring. Deneb does not read an SVG file; it draws marks from data. To rebuild a floor plan you export each region as SVG path data (Inkscape or Illustrator can do it, as can the OKVIZ Designer export), store the path strings in a table alongside the region key, and bind them in one of two ways. In a Vega spec (Deneb supports both Vega and Vega-Lite), use a path mark with encode.update.path set to the path field and the fill bound to your measure. In Vega-Lite, which has no path mark, use a point mark and put the path string in the shape channel, or convert the regions to GeoJSON and draw them with geoshape. Tooltips, cross-filtering and drill-through are supported through Deneb's Power BI integration, so the interactive behaviour can match the old visual.

Budget half a day for a first map if you know Vega-Lite, a couple of days if you do not. The spec is yours and portable between reports. If you want a feel for the grammar before committing, the Deneb alternatives guide linked below has a worked example and a decision table.

A measure that returns an SVG string, with the data category set to Image URL, renders inside a table, matrix or the new card visual (generally available since November 2025). It needs no custom visual, so it survives every tenant policy and every embedding scenario.

The limits are structural. The image is one cell: you cannot click a region to cross-filter the rest of the page, and every row re-renders the whole drawing. Text inside the SVG does not scale with the visual. Keep it for status panels with a handful of zones (a four-bay loading dock, a six-step process strip) where colouring the zones is the whole job, and move on when users expect to click.

Some "synoptic" reports were really maps: regions of a country, sites across a state, delivery zones. For those, Icon Map Pro is a better fit than any image-overlay visual. It supports custom basemaps, polygons, lines, clusters and H3 hexagons, and ties to real coordinates, so a new site appears without redrawing an image. It is a commercial visual; check the current licence terms on icon-map.com before planning around it. It does not solve floor plans, equipment diagrams or anything without geographic coordinates.

VizForge takes a raster image of your map (PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF; if what you recovered is an SVG, export it as a PNG first), detects or lets you trace the regions, binds them to a category field and builds a standalone Power BI custom visual from a fixed synoptic template (not an AI code generation), compiled with the Power BI visuals SDK and packaged as a .pbiviz. You download the .pbiviz and an SVG of the region map; the TypeScript source is not part of the download. Pricing is one-time credit packs (a synoptic map is a one-time 15 credits; packs are $9.99 for 10, $24.99 for 30, $69.99 for 100), so there is no per-viewer licence and no 15-point cap.

Be clear about what it is not. A VizForge visual is as uncertified as the full OKVIZ build: it is a .pbiviz you import into your tenant, so the "Allow visuals created using the Power BI SDK" setting has to be on, and "Add and use certified visuals only" blocks it unless an admin adds it to the organizational visuals store. Microsoft's Publish to web page says custom visuals are supported there, with two exceptions that matter: licence-enforced visuals, and uncertified organizational-store visuals in a certified-only tenant. A generated visual has no licence check, but we have not tested Publish to web in every tenant configuration, so test yours before promising it. Certification also governs PowerPoint export and email subscriptions, where an uncertified visual does not appear. There is no hosted map library and no multi-floor drill hierarchy out of the box; each visual is generated for one image, and multi-level navigation is a bookmark pattern, not a feature.

Where it wins: you want to own the code, you have more than 15 regions, you want the result in minutes rather than a Vega spec, and you are willing to iterate with the refinement loop rather than a formatting pane that someone else designed.

1. Recover the map. Open the old report in Desktop, export the SVG with OKVIZ's Synoptic Panel Toolbox (or find the original file). Keep the region IDs; they are your join key.
2. Keep the data model. The category column that matched area names in v1 is still what you bind. Nothing about the measures changes.
3. Add the new visual next to the old one on the same page. Every option here installs as a separate custom visual (or, for DAX SVG, as a table), so both can coexist while you rebuild. Do not delete the v1 container until the replacement is signed off; it still holds the field bindings you want to copy.
4. Re-create the formatting you relied on: colour rules or conditional formatting, labels, tooltips. Write them down from the old visual first; the v1 settings pane still opens even though the visual does not render.
5. Test in every surface your readers use: Desktop, the Service, the mobile app, Publish to web or Embedded if applicable, and Report Server if you run it. This is where the certified versus uncertified difference shows up, so do it before the switchover, not after.
6. Remove v1, save, publish, and record which version you now depend on so the next retirement is a planned upgrade rather than a Monday-morning incident.