On-premises data gateway FAQ

No, services can generally connect to cloud data sources without a gateway. However, you might need a data gateway if your data sources are behind a firewall, require a VPN, or are on virtual networks.

When using OAuth2 credentials in Dataflows Gen1, the gateway doesn't support refreshing tokens automatically when access tokens expire. Tokens typically expire 1 hour after the refresh starts, but can expire in less than 1 hour, depending on the data source and the tenant policies. Dataflows Gen2, Semantic models, Data pipelines are able to refresh tokens mid-stream and should not be impacted due to this.

Review the requirements section in the installation article.

No, the gateway connects to the data source by using the provided connection information. In this sense, consider the gateway as a client application. The gateway just needs to connect to the specified server.

Currently, Microsoft actively supports only the last six releases of the on-premises data gateway. We release a new update for data gateways every month.

There are no licensing restrictions for installing and registering a gateway.

Check that your network connection has good throughput. Each environment is different, and throughput depends on the amount of data that is sent. To ensure a minimum level of throughput between your on-premises data source and Azure datacenters, use Azure ExpressRoute. To help measure your throughput, you can use the Azure Speed Test app.

The credentials that you enter for a data source are encrypted and stored in the gateway cloud service. The credentials are decrypted at the gateway on premises. For more information about credential encryption in Power BI, go to Power BI security whitepaper.

On your local computer, in the Services app, the service is called "On-premises data gateway service." In Task Manager, on the Services tab, the service name is "PBIEgwService". By default, the Windows service uses "NT SERVICE\PBIEgwService" as the Service SID (SSID).

No, the Windows service needs a valid Windows account.

No, the gateway uses outbound connections to Azure Relay.

Go to Enable outbound Azure connections.

If you block outbound IP traffic, you might need to unblock the Azure Datacenter IP list. The gateway communicates with Azure Relay by using an IP address and a fully qualified domain name. The Azure Datacenter IP list is updated weekly. For more information, go to Enable outbound Azure connections.

To avoid network latency, install the gateway as close as possible to the data source. If you can install the gateway on the actual data source, this closer location minimizes latency.

Also, consider the proximity to the Azure datacenters. For example, if your service uses the West US datacenter, and you have SQL Server hosted in an Azure virtual machine, you might also want your Azure VM in the West US region. This configuration minimizes latency and avoids egress charges on the Azure VM.

The results are sent through Azure Relay. For more information, go to On-premises data gateway architecture.

The gateway requires connectivity to the data source. So, if the data source isn't reachable in your perimeter network, the gateway might not have access.

For example, assume your SQL Server computer isn't in your perimeter network. Also, assume you can't connect to that computer from the perimeter network. If you place the gateway in your perimeter network, the gateway can't reach the SQL Server computer.

Yes.

This priority depends on Windows or the relevant data source drivers. This behavior is configurable in both Windows and various drivers, but isn't under the gateway's control.

No, cross-tenant Microsoft Entra ID access isn't supported. A Power BI semantic model in a tenant can't connect to data sources from a different tenant using a Microsoft Entra ID account. This limitation applies whether the data source uses an on-premises data gateway or not. To overcome this limitation, use an authentication type other than OAuth.

Yes, for more information, go to Force HTTPS communication with Azure Relay. Turning on this feature has little effect on performance.

No, they're different products. To get more information about Data Management Gateway, which is now called Self-hosted Integration Runtime, go to Create and configure a self-hosted integration runtime.

Yes, you must use PowerShell to add other owners to the same gateway. These users can create the gateway in the Azure portal. However, they should connect to the portal and the gateway by using the same tenant.

No. A gateway is still required when connecting to on-premises data sources.

More information: Keep data in the region where it's stored

To help avoid a single point of failure, you can set up on-premises data gateways as clusters for high availability. By default, cloud services such as Power Apps and Power BI use the primary gateway and fall back to the secondary gateway if the primary is unavailable.

When you install the gateway, you supply a recovery key. You can use the key to restore or migrate a gateway.

The key provides a way to add a new gateway to a cluster or to migrate, recover, or take over a gateway.

Troubleshooting

For more information, go to Troubleshoot the on-premises data gateway.

Go to Troubleshooting tools.

You can enable query tracing by turning on additional logging. The logs include the queries that are sent. Remember to turn off query tracing when you're done troubleshooting. Having query tracing enabled causes the logs to be larger.

You can also look at your data source's tools for tracing queries. For example, if SQL Server and SQL Server Analysis Services are data sources, you can use SQL Server Extended Events or SQL Server Profiler to trace queries.

Users are limited to 1,000 data sources per user.

If you reach the maximum number of data sources limit, verify that the number of data sources per user isn't over the limit. To resolve any related issues, you can manually remove the data sources from the admin center or, alternatively, use the following Gateway PowerShell script to find and bulk-delete any data sources that exceed the limit.

## https://video2.skills-academy.com/powershell/module/datagateway/?view=datagateway-ps
## PowerShell version of '7.0.0' to run
## required module "DataGateway" Install-Module -Name DataGateway and sign in the same user who exceeded the 1000 limit
Connect-DataGatewayServiceAccount

## get the gateway information per the sign in person
$gatewayClusters = Get-DataGatewayCluster | where-Object {$_.Type -EQ 'Personal'}; 
foreach ($gw in $gatewayClusters)
{
  $datasources = Get-DataGatewayClusterDatasource -GatewayClusterId $gw.Id;
  foreach ($datasource in $datasources)
  {
    $datasource
    "gateway cluster id={0}, Personal Gateway={1}, datasource id={2}, datasourceType={3}, datasource connection details={4}" -f $gw.Id, $datasource.OnPremGatewayRequired, $datasource.Id, $datasource.DatasourceType, $datasource.ConnectionDetails 
   
    ## conditional logic to determine if name matches set
    ## Remove-DataGatewayClusterDatasource -GatewayClusterId $gw.Id -GatewayClusterDatasourceId $datasource.Id
  }
}

How do I avoid reaching this limit? If you're an ISV or any other Power BI Embedded app owner with many customers, use service principal profiles for multi-tenancy apps in Power BI embedded. If you're not an ISV, you might reach this limit because you're creating a new data source for every CSV or Excel file. To solve this, you might want to use the "upload file box" in Power BI Desktop to select multiple Excel files, which creates multiple data source connections. In this scenario, to ensure that only a single data source is selected, we recommend that you instead select the folder containing those Excel files.

Yes, when you manage a gateway, you can go to the administrator's tab to add more admins. You can also have security groups as admins.

No, the gateway admin manages the gateway from within the service.

If the migration process fails on the new server, the on-premises data gateway still exists in the old server. You can still run that gateway unless the server is offline or the gateway software has been uninstalled. However, to restore the gateway on the old server, you might be asked to use your gateway recovery key.

Since migration includes only two tasks, installing the gateway and restoration and configuration on new server, migration can usually be completed in 10 to 15 minutes.

Yes. However, there's a good chance of failures during this time, and migrations like these should be done in a downtime window. More information: Minimize migration downtime

Next steps

• Troubleshoot the on-premises data gateway