Intermittent "Access to the rosource forbidden" errors while connecting to SF reports

[Anonymous]

I own the Power BI reports and dashboards for my organization and since the past couple of days have been facing a very frustrating issue. We have been getting "Access to the resource is forbidden" error while accessing the Salesforce reports from Power BI desktop. These reports have been live and running and we have had no such issues in the past.  The only change that preceded this error was addition of a new column in the salesforce reports being accessed by PowerBI.

Our access has been checked and we are still able to connect/refresh the datasets intermittently (from Desktop). The scheduled refreshes are also crashing (on the service).

Any pointers? What could have caused this? How can we handle this?

[ReportGuru]

Hi, I know this reply is very late lol, but were you able to find a solution? I've used the Salesforce connector but I had some issues with my data too. As a workardound, maybe you can try to test your connection with a 3rd party connector. I've tried windsor.ai, supermetrics (which doesn't have PBI as a destination, so you first have to export to Google Sheets and then export to PBI) and funnel.io. I stayed with windsor because it is much cheaper so just to let you know other options. In case you wonder, to make the connection first search for the Salesforce connector in the data sources list:

After that, just grant access to your Salesforce account using your credentials, then on preview and destination page you will see a preview of your Salesforce fields:

There just select the fields you need. It is also compatible with custom fields and custom objects, so you'll be able to export them through windsor.  Finally, just select PBI as your data destination and finally just copy and paste the url on PBI --> Get Data --> Web --> Paste the url. 

[amitchandak]

Go to edit query/ data Transformation mode and check if see some error there. I am hopeful, you will some error there. try to correct that

[Anonymous]

@amitchandak I have tried that multiple times, let me share some more details for context.

The main query A is formed by appending 34-40 salesforce reports. On refresh the first error thrown is Access to resource (here A) forbidden. Using data transformation mode and looking at details, the error says Column A not found - incidentally this was a column newly added to all the underlying salesforce reports. The column most definitely is in all of the reports, that was the first think checked. Next if I then try to connect to any of the appended salesforce reports via power bi I again get the Access to resource forbidden error.

What is important to know that while this doesnt work 8 out of 10 days, it can suddenly refresh without any changes. This is impacting our scheduled refreshed and because it's so unpredictable any changes are difficult to implement. In the last 30 mins I have tried refreshing twice, it worked once, did not the other time.

These reports have been stable for over 6 months, and the only change recently done were using a new sharepoint file and addition of new column in the salesforce report.

Any other areas I can explore?