Show data by grouping values in a column - group-by

Question

I'm working on a PowerBI project to analyze some alarm log data generated by one of our applications. For sake of brevity, this is what a typical log would look like if you get rid of all clutter.
TimeStamp,Unit,Alarm,Machine
2020/02/25 13:33:45,A,Error,M1
2020/02/25 13:33:46,B,Error,M1
2020/02/25 13:33:47,C,Serious Error,M2
2020/02/25 13:33:48,A,Warning,M4
2020/02/25 13:33:49,C,Information,M3
2020/02/25 13:33:50,B,Information,M1
2020/02/25 13:33:51,D,Warning,M1
2020/02/25 13:33:52,E,Error,M2
2020/02/25 13:33:53,A,Serious Error,M4
2020/02/25 13:33:54,C,Dead Serious Error,M5
2020/02/25 13:33:55,B,Serious Error,M2
2020/02/25 13:33:56,B,Warning,M1
2020/02/25 13:33:57,D,Information,M3
2020/02/25 13:33:58,A,Warning,M2
2020/02/25 13:33:59,C,Error,M1
2020/02/25 13:34:00,E,Error,M2
2020/02/25 13:34:01,C,Critical Error,M4
2020/02/25 13:34:02,A,Critical Error,M5
2020/02/25 13:34:03,B,Error,M4
2020/02/25 13:34:04,C,Warning,M2
In the designer, if I want to show alarms by count, I can simply create a column chart with Axis = Alarm and Value = Count of Alarm, which would give me the following.
Which is absolutely fine.
But what if I want to generate a similar chart, but alarms grouped by the alarm text. For example, suppose these are my groups.
Errors - Any alarm that contains the word 'error'.
Warnings - Any alarm that contains the word 'warning'.
Other - Everything else.
This would mean the above log would be grouped into 3 categories, and it should look like this.
I generated the above by manually creating another log file, which I don't want to do in my real project. How would I go about achieving this?
I know the GroupBy function exists in the Query Editor, but it doesn't seem to give me the results I need.
Edit
Note that in my real log there are hundreds (if not thousands) of different alarms, and I may also get daily logs from different places where each new log may potentially contain an alarm that wasn't there before. Unfortunately I don't have a full list of alarms across the board, so creating a static table with alarms grouped isn't an option.

Answer 1

You can create a calculated column either in the query editor or using DAX to group these and then use that calculated column instead of Alarm for your axis.
Here's an example of how you could do it with DAX:
Group =
SWITCH (
TRUE (),
CONTAINSSTRING ( 'Table'[Alarm], "Error" ), "Errors",
CONTAINSSTRING ( 'Table'[Alarm], "Warning" ), "Warnings",
"Other"
)
This SWITCH returns the value for the first line that equals TRUE(). More details on this here:
DAX – The Diabolical Genius of “SWITCH TRUE”
You also can do it with a custom column in the query editor using M code like this:
if Text.Contains([Alarm], "Error") then "Errors"
else if Text.Contains([Alarm], "Warning") then "Warnings"
else "Other"
Note: M code is case-sensitive whereas DAX is not.