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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
7 years ago

when are gateways necessary?

I have been reading and hearing conflicting information about when gateways are necessary.  Is there an official knowledge article that discusses when they are necessary?   My immediate need is to ...
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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
7 years ago

Is it safe to say that a gateway is only required for on-prem sources (i.e., not cloud)?  That is, it has nothing to do with the connection mode being import or DirectQuery?

galshaked's avatar
galshaked
New Member
7 years ago

The way I understand it, yes. 

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    7 years ago

    That implies that putting Power BI on top of ServiceNow (i.e., a cloud source) via ODBC in import mode (by default, as ODBC doesn't support DirectQuery) would not require a gateway for refreshes.  However, I am being told by my peers that a gateway is required for refreshes in this scenario.  (Unfortunately, currently, I don't have access to this ODBC driver.  So, I can't test this.)  Are they wrong?

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      7 years ago

      Anonymous we have ServiceNow in the cloud and cannot connect to Power BI because our ServiceNow is allowing only certain IP Ranges. Could your colleagues be mentioning this because you have a similar setup?

       

      Would you have time to talk about the ServiceNow and PowerBI Integration in your environment?

      • Anonymous's avatar
        Anonymous
        Not applicable
        7 years ago

        Anonymous 

        I think the issue you raised is separate from my issue.  My issue is that I don't know if gateways are needed for cloud sources (e.g., ServiceNow).  And does it depend on the connection method to the cloud source?  That is, if I connect to a cloud source via something like ODBC, does the fact that I'm going through ODBC require a gateway?  Further, does it depend on if the ODBC driver is on-prem vs hosted (e.g., on an Azure VM)?  Independent of the gateway issue, I think whitelisting in ServiceNow the Azure (Power BI) IPs is another issue.  I'm not sure if whitelisting IPs in ServiceNow is even possible.

         

        My company has decided that we don't need real-time / DirectQuery reporting on ServiceNow.  (In fact, our ServiceNow admins won't allow analytical queries ran against it.  So, real-time reporting isn't even permitted in my environment.)  So, we are now going to follow a different integration strategy.  That is, we're going to replicate ServiceNow into an on-prem mirror DB, and put Power BI on top of the mirror DB (instead of on ServiceNow directly).  Obviously, that strategy definitely requires a gateway.