Forum Discussion
Service Principal Authentication on Web V2 connection type on On-Premises Data Gateway
Conclusion: Unsupported.
As per Microsoft documentation (Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 - Power Query | Microsoft Learn😞
- The service principal authentication type isn't supported when using an on-premises data gateway or a virtual network (VNet) data gateway.
I've contacted Microsoft Fabric support, who told me there is no ETA for implementing this feature.
If I understand you correctly, I had a somewhat similar issue when, after a report got published, even I, the creator, couldn't access it, because the Service was asking me to authenticate to the underlying datasource, which is a lakehouse. The only thing that worked was OAuth 2.0. FYI, the source is an on-prem DB and the data passes through 2 DFg2s (one for extract, the other for load into the lakehouse), and finally the report connects to the lakehouse using the lakehouse SQL analytics endpoint. The report is created using PBI Desktop and not PBI Service.
My problem happens before adding Dataflows Gen2 or Data Pipelines to the mix. It's while creating the "Connection" - before reporting and even before data loading.
So... I'm afraid I haven't explained myself well enough. 🙄
I'll try again.
To access data from the Fabric Service (or Power BI Service, or Power Platform) in an enterprise environment we need at least one "Connection" configured, that must be configured either through "On-Premises" (using a Power BI Gateway), "Virtual Network" or "Cloud" (directly on the service) - quotes are Microsoft's own terms.
Those connections can be "SQL Server", "Azure SQL Server", "Oracle", "OData", "SharePoint", "Web" or "Web V2", to name just a few.
My data source is a REST service that's behind Service Principal authentication.
So I've created a "Web V2" connection on "Cloud" and that has Service Principal as an option. I've tested it with Data Pipeline and it works. Next step was to use it through Dataflows Gen2.
Problem #1: Dataflows Gen2 doesn't (yet?) support "Cloud" connections.
Problem #2: When I tried to recreate that same connection "On-Premises", Service Principal authentication is not an option.
And here I am.
I hope it's clear now.
Yes, thank you. It's clear now. With the on-prem connection, have you tried authenticating using OAuth 2.0? And if yes, what result did you get?
I have tried, but OAuth 2.0 forces an Azure authentication which doesn't accept the Service Principal ("App Registration") authentication scheme - and that particular REST service only accepts Service Principal authentication.