Forum Discussion
What if a gateway update causes errors?
As you can see from my screenshot there can be many, many corrections issued between regular releases. September 2025 had five versions, for example, and the latest August version was sneakily inserted AFTER the first September version was released.
Of course you can take your own conclusions from that but we have been badly burned in the past by this, and are now extra extra cautious, updating a canary first and then waiting how it behaves. There are tons of feature changes between versions, nearly none of them documented (the latest 0.20 Spark drama for example).
There be dragons.
Hi c_lovestrom,
Yes, your manager's concern is valid, as there is no simple "rollback" button for a bad gateway update. The correct solution is to never update your production gateway first.
You can mitigate this risk in two ways:
Create a Test Environment:
Install a separate "Test" gateway on a different server (a VM is fine).
Connect this gateway to a test workspace in Power BI containing copies of your critical semantic models.
When a new update is released, install it on this "Test" gateway first.
Validate that all refreshes succeed and the data is correct. Only after confirming it's safe do you then update your main production gateway.
Use a High-Availability (HA) Cluster (Best Practice):
Instead of one production gateway (a single point of failure), install the gateway on at least two servers and configure them as a "cluster".
Power BI will automatically balance the refresh load between them.
During an update, you update one server (node) at a time. While one node is updating, all refreshes are automatically routed to the other, resulting in zero downtime and no failed refreshes.
✅ If this response solved your problem, please mark it as correct to help other community members.