Sharing from Analysis Services Multidimensional cube hosted in Azure

[AJW]

We have been running a BI Programme for some time now and have created an OLAP cube using SSAS hosted in Azure. We had settled on the strategy of creating Power BI dashboards pointed to the cube, developed in PowerBI desktop and published to PowerBI.com. We have been sharing these dashboards internally through our O365 setup but are now at a stage where we wish to share to external clients for some specific Dashboards.

When creating a dashboard in this way this week we found that when we published it we got the message that the data would not be accessible in PowerBI.com due to the fact that we needed to upgrade to a gateway (having now investigated we realise that we had been using the connector previously and now need to upgrade to either a personal or enterprise gateway).

I have several questions on this:

Should we download and configure the gateway onto the Azure server which hosts the cube rather than somewhere on-prem?

Which type of gateway should we use - Personal or Enterprise?

Do we need PowerBI Pro to do this?

When we share I have read that readers of the Dashboard would also need PowerBI Pro to view the data? If this is the case then this is not a viable solution for us as we cannot create dashboards for our clients that require them to maintain a PowerBI Pro licence to use them - what are my options?

Thanks!

[dimazaid]

Hi @AJW,
Answers inline to your questions:

• Should we download and configure the gateway onto the Azure server which hosts the cube rather than somewhere on-prem?
  • Either should work. Do you have the Azure server machine and the machine that has the Gateway connected to a domain? They both need to be part of domains. Not nessecarly the same domain, since you can use UPN mapping to map them. Learn more here:
    https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-gateways-april-update/
• Which type of gateway should we use - Personal or Enterprise?
  • For SSAS you need Enterprise gateway.
• Do we need PowerBI Pro to do this?
  • Yes.
• When we share I have read that readers of the Dashboard would also need PowerBI Pro to view the data? If this is the case then this is not a viable solution for us as we cannot create dashboards for our clients that require them to maintain a PowerBI Pro licence to use them - what are my options?
  •  Any dashboard built using pro-content (content that requires pro license) needs a pro-license to view it. This is the only option to get your on-prem data access.

Hope this helps!
Dimah

[AJW]

Thanks Dimah - this helps but also confirms my fear about the sharing. I may need to look at other approaches and strategically this may steer us away from using Power BI. I hope we can find an approach that continues to use it as it a great product!