On-premise data source location to tenant

[dmgdotnet]

We have an azure environment with multiple SSAS instances behind NLB and we are using the On-Premise data gateway to connect to this as a live source.

Our tenant is "based" in Europe (we can see this in the "about" info in the service: Your data is stored in North Europe (Ireland)) and our SSAS instances are in the US.

My question is how the "front-end" of Power BI accesses this data and how are users routed? 

• User in UK
  • Do they get routed to a Power BI Service in Europe?
  • Do the data requests then come from europe -> gateway and ssas instances in the US (this is obviously an overhead to the performance)? 
• User in US
  • Do they get routed to a Power BI Service in the US or always to the "tenant location" (North Europe (Ireland))?

[GilbertQ]

Hi there, I have found that the refreshing of the data is really fast to On-Premise SSAS Instances. So I would first test it and see if that works as expected.

[dmgdotnet]

Hi @GilbertQ,

It definitly works as we have been running this setup for almost a year and is mostly very responsive however there will always be an overhead if traffic is always coming from Europe and I assume data transfer costs as well.

[v-shex-msft · Accepted solution]

HI @dmgdotnet,

AFAIK, current on premise gateway can only install at the same region as your tenant located. So all requests are from North Europe azure data service even if your users are located at different regions. (it will has extra time cost of connecting to a remote data source)

I think modify your instance host device to North Europe will increase refresh performance.

Reference link:

On-premises data gateway

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[dmgdotnet]

Thanks for the response @v-shex-msft. I suspect you are correct based on what I have been reading. We have some support time with MS so I will try and speak to them directly about this to confirm our suspicians and will update here if I get more info.