No idea about Gateways

[CJSquibb]

Hi all, I am starting from a position of no technical background, and am finding that being my own Tenant Admin and IT department is really beyond me.  I train and use Power BI Desktop and show users how to publish reports to the Power BI service and navigate around that.

For myself, I work from a PC or laptop.  My data files files are generally Excel or CSVs, stored in OneDrive for Business, so are accessible from both.  The admin account of my PC is a personal gmail address, but I also have a separate profile for work, which uses the email address and sign-in that I use for my OneDrive for Business and I use this same account for Power BI.

First, do I even need a Power BI Gateway?  I want to be able to schedule automatic refreshes on a couple of datasets I use, which get data either from my OneDrive for Business or from the web.  If I don't, then can I use the simple file locations as data sources, or do I have to connect via the file's OneDrive URL?  It seems to me that if I don't have a gateway installed, then I don't get the option to schedule refreshes.

I have successfully installed the Power BI On-premises data gateway (personal mode) on my desktop machine, as this is generally on, and I can ensure it is on when I am working. This seems to give me access to scheduled refreshes quite successfully - for a while.  BUT it seems that every time I turn off my computer and restart, it then cannot reconnect to the gateway.  I get errors such as "Your gateway is configured correctly but canot be accessed due to network connectivity issues".  The only thing that seems to fix this is to uninstall and reinstall the gateway altogether, then go to my various datasets and relink the credentials for each file - hardly practical.

I must be doing something wrong. I don't know if I need the gateway at all for a scheduled refresh - I have read but never experienced that OneDrive for Business files automatically refresh anyway.  I find the MS troubleshooting articles too technical and they usually seem to be talking about the full gateway service, not the personal gateway app.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[aj1973]

Hi @CJSquibb 

If all your files are in Onedrive for business then you wont need a Gateway. The schedule refresh depends on the way you connect your Dataset : DQ (Direct Query) mode (No need to schedule) or Import Mode ( Up to 8 refreshes a day if you are on Pro License)

As said, connecting to Onedrive for business doesn't need a Gateway. There is a native connector in your Power BI desktop to connect to Onedrive. 

Again if your Dataset is in DQ mode then no need for schedule refresh, Else you can schedule your refresh times up to 8 times a day and no need for Gateway. 

[CJSquibb]

Thank you aj1973, your anwer is very clear, but I'm not quite there yet.

When I uninstalled the gateway, I now find that the refresh option for most of my datasets is greyed out, and if I try to refresh, I get a message saying that the refresh failed because "this dataset needs a gateway".  Presumably I can fix this by returning to each report in Power BI Desktop and relinking back to the source data, then re-publishing - but that will be quite a long job!

Does this mean that I must always use the OneDrive path and Web connector, rather than Get data from Excel? I have published a tiny test dataset and this seems to be working.  And what data credentials are correct for OneDrive - I seem to be using OAuth2 with Privacy level set to None, but is that the best?

[aj1973]

You just said it, you did the test and it worked...apply that on your prod dataset, why looking for work arrounds and short cuts. Best way is always to start over from scratch.

Good luck