Forum Discussion
Helper IIRefresh failures for PBI dashboard
Community SupportHi mjoseph111 , Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.
I think the issue is SSL/TLS trust failure during the SQL login handshake as we can see “The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted” in the error message. Power BI/Gateway often surfaces this as InvalidConnectionCredentials even when the credentials themselves are correct. Since this worked for years, something likely changed recently such as a SQL Server certificate renewal, gateway/driver update, Windows patch or stricter TLS enforcement.
Please check whether the gateway server trusts the SQL Server certificate chain (root/intermediate CA certs), verify the SQL cert has not expired/changed, update the SQL drivers on the gateway machine and test with “Trust Server Certificate” enabled temporarily to confirm the issue. Also worth testing an SSMS connection from the gateway server itself to see if the same certificate warning appears.
Helper IIThanks for your response v-hashadapu . We’re in the earliest stages of transitioning from Microsoft ADFS to Microsoft Entra, and when my account was moved over, that’s when these issues began. Initially, several cloud connections broke, but we were able to reauthenticate those. However, this report failure appears to be tied to Windows authentication, and reauthentication isn’t resolving it.
This report also uses linked servers, so I’m not sure whether that’s contributing to the problem or if, as you mentioned, it could be certificate‑related. I’m not very familiar with testing or validating certificates, so if you have any documentation or guidance that could help me check that, I’d really appreciate it.
- v-hashadapu
Hi mjoseph111 , Thanks for the additional context, now I think this is even more likely related to trust/authentication changes introduced during the ADFS -> Entra transition rather than the SQL credentials themselves being wrong.
Since this dataset had been working for years, something in the authentication/TLS chain likely changed when the identity migration started. Linked servers can also make Windows Authentication and Kerberos delegation more sensitive, so they could definitely be contributing here.
Try connecting to sqlprod03 from the gateway server directly in SSMS using the same Windows authentication method. If you see the same certificate warning there, then the issue is outside Power BI and confirms it is a SQL trust/certificate problem.
Also, as suggested before, please check whether the SQL Server certificate changed recently, whether the gateway server trusts the issuing Root/Intermediate CA certificates and whether the gateway machine’s SQL drivers are fully up to date.
Please read below documents for reference:
Encrypt Connections by Importing a Certificate - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn
Certificate Chain Not Trusted After Driver Upgrade - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn