Forum Discussion
Power BI Personal Data Gateway architecture
In all of my cases, I have generally just had a single gateway and Power BI would find an available gateway and assign the data source to use it. Now, may be mixing some technologies here because Power BI for O365 definitely did this and I had an admin screen, etc. where I could see all of my gateways and manage them. Haven't seen that for Power BI 2.0 so I'll have to play with it and see if it still works like Power BI for O365. I have my hesitations though since it was rebranded "Personal...".
Yes. There is a central location for Gateways and Data Sources in Power BI Admin Center (while using Power BI for Office 365.) For powerbi.microsoft.com, everyone has to install a personal data gateway on their laptops. The plus side is you can only see the data you are allowed to so if your windows or SQL account does not have the right permissions, you cannot view the data. On the negative side, refreshes don't work when your laptop is turned off and I can't find any articles talking about any alternative supported implementation. There has to be a central refresh mechanism for a set of dashboards or reports that the organization needs refreshed without depending on each individual's gateway working right etc. What if the users are not that tech savy to validate all that? Can someone from the Power BI development team kindly assist me with this question?
Tks & Rgds,
Alay
Alay You know, this kind of "fits" with my overall impression of the two Power BI services. I have been scratching my head about it for a long time and your post triggered a thought that I think explains it. The original Power BI for O365 was geared toward MS's typical customer, the enterprise, and thus it had enterprise features. But, trying to break into enterprise BI with an almost purely cloud based service is really hard. I think the new approach is targeted to individuals and get individuals and departments hooked on it, sort of the "shadow IT" that has always existed with Excel. A lot easier to break into that market.
Eh, maybe not...
My understanding is that the personal gateway is not the final sate. I think it is safe to assume that a lot more enterprise grade gateway functionality is coming.
So, the only gateway available for v2 is the personal gateway and each user that creates a dataset that requires a gateway for local files / supported connections must EACH install a personal gateway?
We are using O365 Enterprise and started testing with the original PowerBI and installed a gateway on a server which the admins can see/manage and any dataset from any user could use, but that does not appear possible (currently) in v2 - is that correct?
