On-Prem Gateway breaks when new update available

[goodevans]

Hi folks, we have a dashboard in production use. When the on-prem gateway was updated last Friday, the gateway stopped working on Sunday. This happens every month, but this time it was over a long weekend, and service wasn't restored for days.

The documentation says that previous 6 releases are supported, however in practice it is 0. I am aware that there's a suggestion open for the last 5 years to have auto-updates enabled for the gateway, but that's obviously not a priority.

Is there a configuration that I have missed to allow the gateway to continue working for up to 6 months as per the documentation, or is everyone in the same boat?

[DemianKennel]

Were you able to solve it? Im having the exact same issue. whenever a new gateway version is released, the gateway service stops working and the only solution is to download and install the update.

It just happened to us again this morning and sure enough, new gateway version just released (from 3000.178.9.0 to 3000.182.4.0).

[lbendlin]

@goodevans Couple things:

- the gateway does not "get updated".  Someone in your company has to actively go and install the update manually. Talk to them and ask them not to do the updates without checking the result.

- the last two gateway updates do indeed fail to restart the service upon completion of the installation. I have already complained to Arthi about that, so far without feedback.

- you can install any historical gateway version you like (there's a website with Previous monthly updates to the on-premises data gateways | Microsoft Docs) but you run risk of the rendering engines being out of sync. What they don't tell you is that "downgrade" is a euphemism - you have to totally uninstall the existing software before attempting to install an older version.

- auto updates are a really bad idea, as they will result in the issues described above, and also randomly break existing connectors (prime example is MySQL which is still broken since the 79.6 release, with Microsoft and MySQL pointing fingers at each other, and our users being forced to maintain a frozen 66.8 gateway just for the MySQL connections)

[goodevans]

My issue is different, if a new gateway version is released I have to update to it immediately or else my gateway stops working. I'm the person responsible for updating the gateway in my organisation, but I have 48 hours to do it or else the whole dashboard won't update.

I wasn't aware that there were people stuck using older versions of the gateway software. Are some of the classed as LTS releases or something?

[lbendlin]

I would think that your gateway breakage has a different cause. Yes, there are concerns when the rendering engines don't match between desktop, gateway and service, but that should "only" result in different query plans, not outright stoppage.  Can you provide more details?

I don't think the gateway team knows what the term LTS means.