Gateways

For only 10 bucks a month you can start visualizing your data and finally get the dashboard your executives have been waiting for!! What’s that? You need to refresh the data–perhaps even multiple times a day? Oh, well it’s still $10 a month, but you are also going to install a gateway. What’s that you say? Well, in this episode we begin our discussion on Power BI with one of the first components you will need outside of the Power BI Desktop for your users to start interacting with updated data. We discuss what it is, some of the requirements, and our experiences setting one up.

Guidance for deploying a data gateway for Power BI
On-premises data gateway
On-premises data gateway in-depth

Power BI is so easy to use, you would think that installing/configuring/using a Data Gateway would be easy. It is, if you answer some questions before you get started.

Are you mixing your data sources?

Are you using more than one type of data in your dataset? For example, are you using Excel spreadsheets and SQL Server? Or CSV files and Oracle? If so, you will be in for a big surprise. Currently, only homogeneous datasets are supported in the Data Gateway. If you have heterogeneous datasets (Excel and SQL Server), you will need to use the Data Gateway in Personal Mode. Now, I say currently, but Microsoft is constantly adding new features and improving upon existing features so this may change in the future (no guarantee though) so keep checking.

Where to install your Data Gateway?

Because the Data Gateway acts kind of like an operator, just answering calls and passing them through to the requested data source, you need make sure that you install the Data Gateway as close to your data source as possible to reduce network latency. You don’t want to have your data going through multiple hops to get back to the Data Gateway. Oh, and don’t plan on installing your Data Gateway on a domain controller, because it’s not supported and won’t work.

Are you going through a firewall?

I know this seems like a silly question, of course you’re going through a firewall to get to on-premises data, because you are all security conscious data people. More than likely your firewall will be fairly locked down, which means you will need to open some ports. Luckily they are all outbound ports, so your security administrator shouldn’t give you too much grief in opening them up. In addition to the ports, you will need to whitelist some IP addresses. But keep in mind that Microsoft is constantly adding new data centers and your list of IP addresses can change (the list is updated weekly). This means you will most likely need to automate the retrieval of the IP addresses from Microsoft and apply them to your firewall.

Do you need to use HTTPS instead of direct TCP?

If you are going to be using HTTPS, there’s good news and bad news. Bad news is that you will most likely encounter slower performance. The good news is that the gateway will be strictly using FQDN instead of IP addresses. So instead of having to keep up with all the constantly changing IP addresses for your firewall whitelist, you can simple supply the list of FQDNs to your firewall administrator and no automation will be necessary.

Are you okay with using a local account for the Gateway Service?

When you install the Data Gateway, by default it is installed under a local account that is created by the install process. This account will be granted “log on a service” permissions, so if you’ve got System Administrators that don’t like having lots of local accounts, then you can use a domain account instead.

What account should you use to register the data gateway in Power BI?

While I know that most users are super excited to start accessing on-premises data, you must resist the temptation to register your Data Gateway under a specific user’s account in the Power BI service. What happens if that person goes on vacation or worse yet, leaves the company? You are better off creating a domain account that will act as a service account for registering the Data Gateway. Just make sure that the service account is set up to receive email as Microsoft will send a verification email when the account is first registered with Power BI.

Answering these questions can save you a lot of time down the road. This is not all inclusive list of questions that you need to ask prior to installing/configuring/using a Data Gateway, but they should get you off to a good start.