Does anyone have any experience connecting Power BI to an Oracle XE database remotely? We have a middleware that uses an Oracle XE database for logging, and I want to use BI to monitor it for errors. There is a management portal for this in the middleware, but a Power BI report would be much more powerful and easy to use.

I've gone through all of the Microsoft directions, and I'm getting nowhere. I think I should be trying to establish a remote connection to the database first, but I am at a total loss there and have no idea where to start with Oracle.

Starting with Oracle I usually recommend starting with a lawyer since in general they only motivation is to extract maximum cash from you.
Maybe start with the Oracle data connector, https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-connect-oracle-database/
Are you familiar with the database and table structure of the system? Having a connection is not much use if you don't understand the data layout. I personally am tired of reports and started using data warehouses for everything in the late 90s.
I have moved back into others but lots of my friends are big powerbi users.

I'm familiar with the DB structure and know how I want to view the data in it. I also have the data connector installed. It's setting it up that is the problem. I know the server information and logon information, but I have no idea what I'm doing wrong setting up the TNSNAMES.ora file.

I would.figure the application already has a connection created and that you can connect using the same descriptor

BI requires you to have the oracle client installed on the same machine, so it also has to be set up AFAIK. I think I got the TNSNAMES.ora file figured out, but now I keep timing out while trading the ODBC connection and trying to set up a connection from BI. I can ping the server itself just fine from my machine, and I can successfully ping the oracle listener while on the server. I have no idea what's happening when I'm trying to contact the listener from my machine. I need to figure out tomorrow how to try to ping the listener from my machine or if I can.

Got it. Stupid domain firewall was blocking the remote connection the whole time.