Connect to Analysis Services with live connection from non domain PC ?

[cplesner]

Hi all

I'm trying to figure out whether it will be possible for users(a customer) with an Azure AD login to access an Analysis Services Tabular model, hosted on a VM machine running in Azure?

So the customers laptop is not joined to the Domain, but we have created as user on our AAD that they can use. The user have PowerBI desktop and wants to connect to the Tabular Model sitting on the SSAS server running on our VM in Azure.

What I have found so far is that if I run PowerBi desktop on my domain PC, create the reports and dashboards and publish the workbook to powerbi.com and i can afterwards use the Gateway to keep the live connect, but that means that I have to make the PowerBI report/dashboard from my machine. Any suggestions ?

I also considered, giving a VPN to the customer so that they can connect to the Azure VN, that is joined to the Azure AD. And then he/she can run PowerBI desktop using run as

runas /netonly /user:domain\customerlogin "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\bin\PBIDesktop.exe"

Haven't tested that though

[v-yuezhe-msft]

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I also considered, giving a VPN to the customer so that they can connect to the Azure VN, that is joined to the Azure AD. And then he/she can run PowerBI desktop using run as

runas /netonly /user:domain\customerlogin "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\bin\PBIDesktop.exe"

Haven't tested that though

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Hi @cplesner,

The method you describe is possible, you can check the discussion in this similar thread.

But in this scenario, please enter database name when connecting to SSAS using Live option in Power BI Desktop, otherwise you may get error message “Sorry the server you are trying to connect to doesn't have any models”.

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[tringuyenminh92]

Hi @cplesner,

I'm not sure that I understand correctly your situation or not. But if you have end-users belongs to AAD domain and want to map these user accounts to one role in your domain server hosted SSAS, you could use Map Username feature for SSAS. And when end-users access PBI service, the data query will be executed under the user and its role that you have mapped.

[cplesner]

Hi tringuyenminh92

Yes i know i can do that, but what i'm after is that imagine that I have a Tabular model that holds your data as a customer and I want to give you the possibility of connecting to it with your PowerBI desktop to build your own dashboards/reports. For that i have created a user on our domain in AAD, but you and your laptop is not on our company domain