PowerBI Desktop, Gateways and Measure connectivity?

[Rich_P_G]

Hi Guys,

Im after a bit of advice before I go further with this one. I have authored a report in Desktop and shared into a dashboard in the online Service. Within the report I successfully connected to a SQL server database via a live connection. I also created a number of measures which are vital for tracking performance against targets and delivering metrics that are calculations based on existing data.

At present this all works great, but I have the gateway installed on my local machine. As a result, If I was to share this with colleagues, they could only access whilst my machine was turned on.

I would like to move the gateway to a networked server, but am not sure how this would work with the Desktop software. I would ideally like the ability to connect from my PowerBI Desktop into the Gateway on the network server, and create my measures as normal in the desktop software on my local machine. Is this possible?

What im basically trying to understand is whether the gateway can be installed and active on one machine, but I can access the data and author reports via Desktop on a separate machine, including measures and calculations. Pretty sure if I was just to use the online service this would be fine, but the online service does not allow me to create and update the measures I need.

Thanks!

[ankitpatira]

@Rich_P_G You don't need gateway to be able to connect live from power bi desktop to data source on premise. Gateway is only required for power bi service. Gateway should be installed on server that is never turned off and so that reports in your power bi service are able to connect to your data source via gateway. 

[Rich_P_G]

@ankitpatira Thanks. The reports I am authorting on desktop are being published to the Service for use in dashboards that others in my team can access.

I want to be able to have reports authored on my machine in Desktop with calculated measures, connecting to data in sql server. These reports are then published to the Service to drive tiles in dashboards. 

What im trying to understand is whether I can have the gateway running on one machine, and use another machine to author the reports and measures in PowerBi desktop?

Ideally, all members of my team would author reports in Desktop, connecting to data through the same on premise gateway. They would then share their reports into a collaborative workspace on the service so that we could add to existing dashboards.

[v-ljerr-msft]

@Rich_P_G

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What im trying to understand is whether I can have the gateway running on one machine, and use another machine to author the reports and measures in PowerBi desktop? 

Yes, you can. The gateway just acts as a bridge, providing quick and secure data transfer between on-premises data (data that is not in the cloud) and the Power BI Service(not Power BI Desktop).  Power BI Desktop can connect to the data source itself without the gateway.

Reference:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-gateway-onprem/

Regards