Currently, Microsoft actively supports only the last six releases of the on-premises data gateway. We release a new update for data gateways every month.
Note
Beginning on March 15, 2023, any Power BI dataflow using an on-premises data gateway version older than April 2021 might fail. To ensure your refreshes continue to work correctly, be sure to update your gateway to the latest version and sign in to it.
The on-premises data gateway is a locally installed Windows client application that acts as a bridge between your local on-premises data sources and services in the Microsoft cloud. It provides quick and secure data transfer and requires no inbound ports to your network - only outbound ports to reach the Azure web service to which the gateway connects. The gateway functions with multiple services including Azure Analysis Services, Azure Data Factory, Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft Fabric, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI.
By using a gateway, organizations can keep databases and other data sources on their on-premises networks while securely using that on-premises data in cloud services.
There are two different types of on-premises data gateways, each for a different scenario.
On-premises data gateway: Allows multiple users to connect to multiple on-premises data sources. With a single gateway installation, you can use an on-premises data gateway with all supported services. This gateway is well suited to complex scenarios where multiple people access multiple data sources.
On-premises data gateway (personal mode): Allows one user to connect to data sources and can't be shared with others. An on-premises data gateway (personal mode) can be used only with Power BI. This gateway is well suited to scenarios where you're the only one who creates reports and you don't need to share any data sources with others.
In addition, there's a virtual network (VNet) data gateway that lets multiple users connect to multiple data sources that are secured by virtual networks. No installation is required because it's a Microsoft managed service. This gateway is well suited to complex scenarios in which multiple people access multiple data sources. Virtual network data gateways are discussed in depth in What is a virtual network (VNet) data gateway.
We cache credentials on the gateway client side, which improves the performance of the queries executed on the gateway. The cache expires in a matter of hours. However, this means that changed credentials might not be immediately reflected and can cause refreshes to fail. For example, if a user uploads a direct query report with a connection and then edits that connection's credentials, the new credentials aren't used for approximately 5 hours and the user can expect the connection in the report to fail.
Users are limited to 1,000 data sources maximum on each enterprise or personal gateway cluster. How to avoid reaching this limit.
Gateway documentation
This document contains general information about the on-premises data gateway that applies to all services that the gateway supports. You can obtain more on-premises data gateway information for specific products by visiting the following product-specific sites.
Demonstrate the business value and product capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform, such as Power Apps, data connections with Dataverse, and Power Automate.
This article looks at the on-premises gateway in-depth. It looks at how the service works with Microsoft Entra ID and your on-premises Active Directory.
You can create clusters of on-premises data gateways to provide high availability for your enterprise. In addition, you can configure your clusters to provide load balancing over multiple computers.
Discusses how to fix blocked outbound connections, how to configure certain ports for the on-premises data gateway to create an outbound connection to Azure Relay, how to force the gateway to communicate with Azure Relay by using HTTPS instead of direct TCP, and how to ensure your gateway machine is using TLS 1.2 to communicate with the Microsoft Power BI service.
This article provides ways for you to troubleshoot issues you might have with the on-premises data gateway. It provides potential workarounds to known issues and tools to assist you.
Both the on-premises data gateway and the virtual network (VNet) data gateway provide quick and secure data transfer between your data and several Microsoft cloud services.