Forum Discussion
Cannot see my gateway from Get Data
Hey kgarron,
The gateway acts as the middleman between the Power BI service and on-premises data sources when attempting to do a data refresh. It has nothing to do wtih getting data into a Power BI model initially. That is mostly done through the Power BI Desktop application.
General workflow when it comes to using a gateway:
1) Use PBI Desktop to connect to a data source(s) whether they be on-prem, online, cloud, etc.
2) Make data model in Power BI Desktop, create reports, etc.
3) Publish report to Power BI Service
4) Configure dataset refresh if needed and there it will ask for a gateway
What you see under "Get Data" in the Power BI Service is what's available from a cloud only perspective (i.e. Azure services for now). Any other data source you want to connect to, especially if it's on-premises must be done using Power BI Desktop, and then the subsequent data refreshes are done using the gateway.
Hope this helps, thanks.
That's such a terrible setup. My onpremises data sources are deeply hidden behind firewalls. Now I need to install all that jazz on my client notebooks even though I've already set up a gateway on a dedicated VM in the server farm?
The idea is to install the gateway on a server that can access all of your deeply hidden servers, but also has its own access to the internet. The gateway will then provide you the mid server ability to bridge securely into your data sources from the outside world.