Using a gateway to refresh data

[Anonymous]

Our users are publishing more and more reports using datasets with the PowerBi gateway and their Active Directory users for authentication.

With our password policy the credentals exire regularly and some users have a lot of datasets they need to refresh manually with their new password.

Datasets are for now mostly Excel files on a share. Is their a more business-way to do this?

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous - If your users are using data gateways in personal mode, you should consider installing one or more data gateways in standard/enterprise mode. This will allow you to configure data connections in a central location and use a service account. Also, you should probably consider more of a centralized or golden dataset model. See my article on Power BI Usage Models:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/Power-BI-Usage-Models-in-Pictures/ba-p/1342820

I always recommend at a minimum 4 separate Power BI service accounts:

• Power BI Tenant Administrator
• Power BI Publisher
• Power BI Gateway
• Power BI Data Access

The names should be self explanatory for what they are used for. In terms of best practice, each data source should have its own data access service account.

[amitchandak]

@Anonymous , You can use a service account on the gateway. See if that can work for you

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-service-account