Auto sign in to on-premise data gateway

[bhushangawale]

Hi, 

We have installed the Power BI data gateway closely to our database on one of the Azure VM and works fine, however everytime the VM is restarted it sings out the gateway logged in account and gateway is shown as not available or offline untill we sign in again. We have ensure that we have installed the gateway in non-personal mode. 

Currently, it is quite annoying to keep on checking for availability and VM status, Is there any way to avoid the re-login step everytime the machine is restarted to bring gateway online? Or would there be any way to auto-sign in to the gaetway (startp script?) whenever the machine is restarted?

Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

I'm seeing this same issue now on an Azure VM. The gateway service recovery is set to automatically restart but it doesn't. If I try to manually Start the service I get an error 1069: The Service did not start due to logon failure. The only way I've been able to get it started again is to reinstall and take over the previous gateway. 

I had this similar problem a year ago on an SQL Server on AWS but in that case, the Service would manually Start. Prior to that, I had the issue on an on-premises SQL Server. 

In 3 different environments, I've seen this issue. I've installed the on-premises gateway as directed and kept them up-to-date/current when new versions are available. Perhaps I have a curse of the on-premises data gateway, or maybe there is a solution out there? If anyone has insights please share.

[CmdrKeene]

I'm looking for a solution here too.  We have about 10 users of PowerBI but I'm the only one that creates datasets, and the gateway runs on my machine. But every time my machine restarts, the PowerBI service stops refreshing because my gateway cannot be reached. Once I've logged-into that machine again, the refresh begins working.

[rohit_acharya]

Like @bhushangawale mentioned there is no need to sign in whenever server restarts. After several rounds of debugging we were able to troubleshoot. In any given server there can only be one gateway running, whenever a new gateway instance is installed the older one automatically signs-off. There is no support for parallel gateways to be running on a server. This caused our gateway to log off all the time. 

[BG50]

Same issue here. It seems there was some change either on our server with Power BI in the last few months. We are running On-Premis Gateway in personal mode. When ever the server is restarted the gateway disconnects and I have to login to the Gateway before it reconnects. I have only found community documents that say that this does not happen. Anyone else find that this does happen still and any workarounds? I am using personal mode so I am thinking perhaps going to the non-personal mode might do something different. The personal mode seems fine as I am the  only one who uses Power BI. Any help or even tips for what to reserch would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[v-yuezhe-msft]

@bhushangawale,

It is not possible to use script to auto-sign in to gateway whenever the machine is started. I have made a test, the on-premises gateway is still online and schedule refresh isn't impacted each time we restart gateway machine.

Regards,
Lydia

[bhushangawale]

@v-yuezhe-msft Thanks for your response, glad to know that your test worked. Can you point if I have missed anything while installing or configuring the gateway on our Azure VM? It still gets logged out and shown as disconnected everytime the VM is restarted.

[bhushangawale]

Any update on this please? Gateway login still keeps on logging out whenever the host virtual machine is restarted.

[bhushangawale · Accepted solution]

All right after several workarounds, realized that there is no need to auto-sign to the gateway whenever your host machine gets restarted why?

Why is because - the on premises data gateway in the background runs as a service however you might want to set it's start up type as automatic so that it gets started whenever your machine is restared. Please note that the gateway UI will keep on showing you that you need to sign in again but you can ignore that because the service already knows how to get going with the service account. 

[BG50]

This is not true with our set up. Server 2016 when ever restarted we have to sign back into on-premisis gateway. Thx.

[rohit_acharya]

@bhushangawale  I too have the same annoying problem of gateway switching off everytime the host restarts and this points to me logging in everytime it restarts. any idea how we can how to set its startup type as automatic?

[Anonymous]

Anyone found the solution to this problem.  I will also prefer not to be using my personal work email address to set this up in the event someone else has to take ownership of the reports.