Appropriate cost of managed vnet gateway in Power BI?

[dbeavon3]

How do we evaluate the cost/benefit of the managed vnet gateway?  We can build our own VM with our own gateway and it is quite a bit cheaper.  Has anyone else determined that Microsoft's meters for the gateway are unreasonable, as compared to putting your own VM in a VNET?

This vnet gateway stuff is now the third most expensive background operation in our capacity.
It is costing between $500 and $1000 a month, for a minimal number of refreshes.

We never would have assumed it would be so expensive. For years while the managed vnet gateway was in preview, we had used it with no additional cost.

Has anyone considered the cost/benefit of using this managed gateway, instead of just hosting your own in an Azure VM? I think Azure VM's can be half the price ($300 to $500 per month), and you don't have to worry about adding every new refresh to the schedule (ie. won't be "nickled-and-dimed"). Aside from periodic maintenance of the PaaS resource in azure, what other considerations would come into play? This seems like a very simple way to save $5 or $6 grand a year.

Is this another case where Microsoft is charging Power BI users more money, because they believe this target audience is not in a position to build a VM in Azure PaaS?  Does the decision simply depend on whether your company has an I.T. department or not?

... Or are they charging us for rarely-used features that keep us safe - like fault-tolerance and scalability (during usage spikes)?

Personally I think the cost of this component is quite excessive.  But I may not be a good judge because, generally speaking, Fabric seems like a place where people are happy to pay a lot more than they should.

[v-xinc-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @dbeavon3 ,

Thank you for asking such questions here to help us provide with better service and more satisfactory user experience.

For your confusion, I will analyze the advantages of the two gateways separately:

Benefits of Managed VNet Gateway:

The virtual network data gateway:

1. Is a powerful network security offering: it can be used with private endpoints for Azure data sources to ensure that no traffic is ever exposed to a public endpoint.
2. It supports Private Link scenarios. Please refer to using your VNET data gateway with Private Links to learn more.
3. It can be used with public endpoints for Azure, other cloud, and on-premises data sources.
4. The hardware is fully managed, and it can thus be a more cost-effective alternative to the on-premises data gateway.
5. It can be used to provide comprehensive auditing for all traffic to your data source.
6. It provides compute isolation enhancing security from cross tenant attacks.

We could get more information from Manage virtual network (VNet) data gateway high availability and load balancing | Microsoft Learn.

Benefits of Self-Host Gateway:

The Self-Host Gateway:

1. Reduce monthly cost if your usage pattern is predictable and you can optimize the size and configuration of the VM.
2. Offer greater flexibility and can be customized according to specific needs.

You could consider the following aspects when you want to make a choice:

1. It depends on your IT Resources, you could choose the managed service if your IT resources are limited. However, the self-host VM gateway could be feasible and cost-effective if your organization has a robust IT department.
2. Self-host gateway require maintenance, it will add to the operational burden.
3. Managed VNet Gateway will be crucial for mission-critical applications because it has higher reliability and built-in redundancy.

I hope the above information can better help you understand the advantages of two gateways and help you choose the more satisified gateway.

Best regards,

Lucy Chen

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