Do I need a Power BI Gateway to report from external third party (Azure SQL server)

[johnjrd]

Hi

I've the following situation.

An external company have stood up a reporting server (to what seems to be one of their Azure SQL servers) which we can connect to via Power BI Desktop, however when we are unable to publish the reports to our PBI service.  I've been told by our security team we need to put a Power BI Gateway in place to communicate with the external server.  However I was under the impression that gateways were needed to communicate with on-prem data sources.  Any ideas on what the solution could be?

[v-mengzhu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @johnjrd ,

Yes that's right, if the data source is located locally, a gateway needs to be configured to connect the communication.
But in addition to this case, if your data source is located on another server, you also need to install a gateway. So as your security team suggested, I also think you do need to install a gateway.

Best regards,

Community Support Team Selina zhu

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly

[blopez11]

You should not need a gateway for your reports to refresh off of a sql server database in azure.  Can you be more specific on why you are unable to publish the report to the power bi service? Are you see an error during publish, or when trying to schedule a refresh?

[johnjrd]

So I need to publish to allow other users to see the report via a Workspace for my organisation.  The azure sql I'm connecting to is external to my organisation but works in desktop app (as i presume my ip is whitelisted) but not via the service.

The error I get when trying to connect or refresh the data via the service is along these lines

Selected user account does not exist in tenant xxxx and cannot access the application xxxx in that tenant.  The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first.