Power BI Gateway - Refresh Question

Rebekah Singleton

Hi there!

I successfully created a custom connector for NXT to PBI, and then used @Matt Thacker's awesome guide to create a gateway and set up scheduled refreshes. Everything is working really seamlessly (which is very exciting, super grateful to everyone involved in making these resources available).

The issue I'm having is that when I'm offline, the data refresh fails. I just moved the Power BI Desktop folder to my OneDrive so it's on the cloud but it still doesn't work. I am going to be offline for several days on PTO soon and am not sure if the data will be accessible to my team, and I'd really like to figure it out for future reference. Is there any way for the data to be refreshed if my machine is off?

Matt Thacker

Hey @Rebekah Singleton, so the short answer to your question is; yes, you're correct. If the data gateway is installed on your local machine, the gateway goes offline if your machine is offline.

There are a couple of options depending on the architecture your organization uses, but here are the most general ways to fix the issue:

• The easiest one would be to not turn off the machine during a period of scheduled refresh (only if the computer is locked and on a secured network)
• Rather than install the gateway on your local machine, install the gateway on your company's on-prem server.
• If your organization uses Azure, or another cloud-based server, create a virtual machine and install the gateway in the VM.

For the last two options, you'll need to ensure the Blackbaud Connector is accessible to the gateway.

Rebekah Singleton

@Matt Thacker Thanks so much for your quick response (and for the gateway set-up doc, super helpful). My org is quite small and not very sophisticated with our IT, so unfortunately no on-prem server or azure, we just use OneDrive/SharePoint. I've heard Azure is actually quite accessible for non-profits though so maybe that's a solution I can look into. Appreciate your help!

Matt Thacker

@Rebekah Singleton, I'd definitely recommend looking into Azure if you're a nonprofit. They provide an annual “grant” of $3,500 for Azure services.

Akane Henriquez

@Rebekah Singleton I have a setup like this, excel files saved to business onedrive and I connect to that file and the online service can refresh it on a schedule. are you still troubleshooting?

Rebekah Singleton

@Akane Henriquez I don't think there is a solution other than what Matt recommended previously! As soon as my computer goes to sleep the refresh fails, so we are looking into Azure to create a virtual machine and have the gateway installed there.