Forum Discussion

OneWithQuestion's avatar
OneWithQuestion
Icon for Post Prodigy rankPost Prodigy
9 years ago
Solved

Enterprise Gateway: Not possible to use as data source?

I use an Enterprise Gateway to call back to SSAS Tabular on prem.   I was looking at using Desktop to build some reports and I can't seem to work out how to connect to it as my data source?   I c...
  • dkay84_PowerBI's avatar
    dkay84_PowerBI
    9 years ago

    You add the data source to the gateway and then point Power BI desktop to the data source and the gateway will use your Power BI login credentials to authenticate you against the data source

OneWithQuestion's avatar
OneWithQuestion
Icon for Post Prodigy rankPost Prodigy
9 years ago

Yes.

 

The gateway works great for stuff I do in the web service only, but I can't seem how to point the Desktop to use my enterprise gateway when I go to create a new report in Desktop?

 

 

I must be missing something obvious.

 

With Power BI Desktop:

Can you select an existing data gateway as a data source to create a new report? 

 

dkay84_PowerBI's avatar
dkay84_PowerBI
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
9 years ago

You add the data source to the gateway and then point Power BI desktop to the data source and the gateway will use your Power BI login credentials to authenticate you against the data source

  • OneWithQuestion's avatar
    OneWithQuestion
    Icon for Post Prodigy rankPost Prodigy
    9 years ago

    So I don't point Desktop to the gateway I just point it to the exact same SSAS Tabular servername and everything that the enterprise gateway was setup to use?

     

    Then when I publish a report Power BI service will "just know" to use the gateway I already setup?

    • OneWithQuestion's avatar
      OneWithQuestion
      Icon for Post Prodigy rankPost Prodigy
      9 years ago

      OK, that's exactly how it works, cool.

       

      I just didn't expect it would be able to take the local desktop data connection and match it to the Enterprise Gateway, cool!

    • dkay84_PowerBI's avatar
      dkay84_PowerBI
      Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
      9 years ago

      The gateway is a service bus that handles communication between PowerBI service and the data source.  When you publish a report that points to a data source that has been added to the gateway, the gateway will authenticate your access to the data source upon refreshing/querying the data.

       

      Your desktop app should be able to connect to on prem data sources (provided you have access) without the gateway.  However, those login credentials you used (i.e. server name and password) to connect to the data source will be encrypted and stored so that the gateway can query data from on prem.  

       

      Here are the steps that occur when Power BI service talks to the data source:

       

      1. A query will be created by the cloud service, along with the encrypted credentials for the on-premises data source, and sent to the queue for the gateway to process.

      2. The gateway cloud service will analyze the query and will push the request to the Azure Service Bus.

      3. The on-premises data gateway polls the Azure Service Bus for pending requests.

      4. The gateway gets the query, decrypts the credentials and connects to the data source(s) with those credentials.

      5. The gateway sends the query to the data source for execution.

      6. The results are sent from the data source, back to the gateway, and then onto the cloud service. The service then uses the results.

      Power BI service "knows" to use the gateway because when you installed it you had to sign in, effectively pairing the gateway with your Power BI account.

       

      https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-gateway-onprem-faq/