PowerBI with Tabular SSAS - Analysis services connector or Gateway?

[MSBIDev2012]

Hi,

We have a scenario where our PowerBI dashboards connect to Tabular Analysis services using live connection. Here are a few points about the environment:

a) The Analysis Services Tabular cube is residing in an IAAS environment. We are currently using Power BI Gateway.

b) We have a huge workload going up to many thousands of users.

c) Our cube refreshes once every hour and Power BI creates a huge amount of pressure on infra as it has to refresh the cache for every user,query combination.

Questions:

1) I would like to know from the experts what would be the better option to choose between Analysis Services Connector and Power BI gateway. Would any of these perform better than the other in some scenarios?

2) Is there a way we define what is an active connection for PowerBI? Looks like it caches queries for users who have logged in any time in the last 2 weeks.

Any tips on cache management, setting recommendations are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

[MSBIDev2012]

Hello experts,

Please let me know if anyone has any inputs with respect to my queries.

Thanks in advance!

[v-shex-msft]

Hi @MSBIDev2012,

Which type of AS datasource you mentioned? Can you please share more detailed contents?

>>b) We have a huge workload going up to many thousands of users.

If these users are in same tenant, you can use one gateway to handling multiple refresh request.

Manage your data source - SQL Server

For performance issues, I'd like to suggest you take a look at below article:

Power BI Performance Best Practices

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[MSBIDev2012]

Thanks Xiaoxin! AS is SQL Server 2016 Tabular Analysis Services model on an Azure VM.

[v-shex-msft]

HI @MSBIDev2012,

>>AS is SQL Server 2016 Tabular Analysis Services model on an Azure VM.

It seems like you are using a on-premise datasource. 

In my opinion, 'connection directly' mode will be more suitable with huge workload situation.(online datasource)

Since you are using on-premise datasource, connection directly mode not work for your scenario, so you had to set up a gateway to manage refresh operation.

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng