I agree that the expected behavior is that you should be able to connect to the gateway from power BI online and create a dataset. If that is not the case, this should of cause be clarified in the guide. Nowhere it says that "Now the next step is to use/consume your gateway data source. This must be performed using Power BI Desktop, so install that and..."
Ah, this is exactly what I was trying to find too..
Power BI Desktop is your development tool. As you are using it from your computer, it will have all of the properties of being inside your network. Your gateway isn't relevant when you use your Power BI Desktop. Once you publish into the cloud, your Power BI lives within Microsoft and not your network. The gateway is required to create that secured connection from the cloud into your network.
I created a pbix locally then published it and when setting it to auto-refresh the data I had to install the data-gatweay (personal mode) which was fine for POC but now that I want this in production how can I find my organizations on-premise data gateway that's been setup? When I go to "Manage Gateways" from the settings menu in Power BI on the web I just get the screen that says: "You don't have any data gateways." How would I go about getting the one we have here to show up on this screen?
Hi @mgiusto , That answer will need to come from your internal infrastructure team in your organisation. Someone inside your organisation will have needed to install this onto a Server. Whoever has been set up as the adminstrator of that gateway will need to give you access.
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.
ah, I did not realize that. I will try and create something in the Desktop application and publish it. I appreaciate the input.
The only report you can create via the online "Get Data" thru the Gateway is using Analysis Services.
