How Much Work is a Power BI Data Gateway?

A Power BI Gateway acts as the secure bridge between your company’s private, on-premises data and the Power BI Service in the cloud. If you want to build reports from data sitting on a server in your office (like a SQL database or an Excel file on a network drive), you’ll need a gateway to keep the cloud version refreshed automatically. This article breaks down exactly how much work is involved in setting up and maintaining one, demystifying the process from start to finish and helping you determine what scale is appropriate. We'll cover the upfront effort, long-term maintenance, and the different types of gateways you can use.

What Exactly Is a Power BI Data Gateway?

Think of the Power BI Gateway as a secure chauffeur. Its only job is to transport data queries from the Power BI cloud service to your local data source, and then shuttle the resulting data back up to the cloud to refresh your reports and dashboards. It never moves or copies a big chunk of data, it only executes live requests between Microsoft's cloud and your business network.

Why is this necessary? Security. Your company's internal file servers and databases aren't (and shouldn't be) directly exposed to the internet. The gateway provides a secure, encrypted tunnel that allows Power BI to "knock on the door" and ask for new data without you having to open that door to the whole world. It uses standard HTTPS outbound connections, so you typically don’t need any special firewall rules.

It acts as the go-between for a variety of on-premises data sources, including:

SQL Server, Oracle, and other relational databases
Excel files
CSV or text files
SharePoint folders
And many more

The Two Flavors of Gateway: Standard vs. Personal Mode

Before you calculate the work involved, you need to understand the two different modes the gateway can operate in. They are designed for completely separate use cases from each other.

Standard Mode (For The Whole Team)

This is the gateway you'll use for any serious, team-based BI deployment. It's meant for multiple users and is installed on an "always-on" machine, like a server or a dedicated desktop.

Runs as a service: This is the key difference. Because it runs as a system service, it’s always on and active in the background, even if no one is logged into the machine.
Multi-user: You can install one Standard Mode Gateway and give multiple developers permission to connect to its data sources from the Power BI Service. Everyone shares the same secure pipeline instead of setting up their own.
Flexible connection types: It supports a variety of data importing technologies, depending on the data source: Import (scheduled refresh), DirectQuery (runs live queries), and Live Connection (for SSAS). While Import has a set-it-and-forget-it methodology, technologies like DirectQuery can get far more technically complicated.

The Work Involved: Setting up a Standard Mode Gateway is the version many people consider "the real thing." You'll need local admin rights on the server you install it on, which usually means coordinating with your IT team. You also need to actively manage which users have access to which data sources, which we'll break down below. This is all doable by just about anyone, with more advanced technical configurations left for a more dedicated DBA and ETL expert role.

Personal Mode (For Single Developer Use Cases)

A Personal Mode Gateway is designed for a single user, letting you publish and refresh reports from your own computer. However, as it's not a true system service, there are plenty of limitations:

Runs as an application: Unlike Standard Mode, it runs as an application tied to your user session. This means if you log out of Windows or your PC reboots, the gateway stops working and refreshments will fail until you start it up again.
Just for you: No one else can use its connection. It’s tied directly to your user account and cannot be shared.
Limited connections: It only supports Import connection, not Live Connection or DirectQuery, due to its one-way street design.

The Work Involved: Very little. If you're building a BI dashboard and don't care that anyone else will use your version, this is perfectly serviceable. You run the installer on your own machine and connect to Power BI. It’s perfect for one-off projects or testing before transitioning to a more robust, shareable Standard Gateway.

Sizing Up the Work: Installation and Setup

So, assuming you need a real, scalable solution and have opted for Standard Mode, how much work are we talking about? The process can be broken down into a few distinct phases, most of which involve coordination rather than complex technical action a single developer has to address from end to end to manage a project this large for an entire team.

Step 1: Get Access To the Physical or Virtual Machine That Will Be Our Home Base

This is the most crucial decision and often where the bulk of the "work" lies. The gateway needs an "always on, always connected" home. It absolutely cannot be your personal laptop. Good choices include:

A virtual machine (VM) in your company’s on-premises environment or in a cloud provider like Azure
A reliable desktop machine sitting in a server room that's not used for other things

At a minimum, Microsoft recommends a machine with an 8-core CPU and 8 GB of RAM. For frequently used gateways, you’ll thank yourself later for spec-ing out a machine that exceeds these baseline guidelines for better speed and quality on your dashboard. Often, the first step in creating this machine lies in creating a ticket.

Step 2: Performing The Actual Installation

The installation itself is fairly simple, assuming your ticket went as you expected. It’s a classic download-and-click-through Windows setup:

Download the installer from the Power BI Service.
Run the MSI file.
At the input prompt asking what installer type to use, select the "on-premises data gateway" option.
Continue clicking through a standard application installer process you are familiar with on any new Windows software.

Where most users find they need to do work beyond simply clicking "next" and "yes" lies in the permission level of their user group for this PC. You’ll need local admin privileges to install the gateway software. If you're like many in-house data managers in a corporation, you may lack access to local admin permissions on all the computers you access on-premises. You’ll likely have to coordinate with an IT administrator to either get them logged in once and assist with any ongoing updates.

Step 3: Setup And Getting Connected To Your Power BI Workspace

Next, you need to sign into the Power BI account associated with the dashboard and workspace you hope to install the solution for.
You can register the gateway to your workspace or create an entirely new gateway. Name your gateway something descriptive (e.g., “Sales Dept Gateway on Server_A5”) so everyone knows what data is available.
Then, save and store a "Recovery Key" and copy and paste this into an appropriate file. This is how you manage your entire Gateway after initial setup and installation. Ensure it is stored in an online location to manage the Gateway afterward.

Step 4: Creating Data Connections That Allow Users To Connect to the Power BI Service

With the gateway running, the work shifts from the machine to the cloud. You’ll need to manage and add your gateways, select the gateway you just installed, and then click “+ New Connection” to continue with this entire installation and setup process. You’ll add info for a connection to an underlying database, like this:

Create a descriptive name for your connection so that other data managers at your company understand it without talking to you directly.
Choose whatever specific “Connection Type" you plan for this data to in your Power BI dashboard.
Provide access to these database information: data source name, database credentials such as login URL, and port numbers needed for network access by a developer from their specific PC. All these need the correct permissions for user roles with your database. Otherwise, once users connect from your Gateway, you would have all types of permission errors later on while users try to complete even the most basic tasks.

Long-Term Maintenance on Microsoft Azure

Gateway Management

Updates come to Power BI monthly, every few months in reality, every three or four months. It is highly recommended to update by all major Microsoft products, as new releases provide a much higher level of security against the most modern viruses and online hacker or phishing attacks. You will likely have a few user groups within your BI team that do the core of the database architecture, while others have the access permission to run the simple, monthly update for one server. The work comes in the design phase you must come up with your team, and it should match the existing or legacy tech setup you already maintain.

Performance Monitoring the Health of The Server And Any New Software

You can and must get alerted about failures via a service within Power BI's data platform, so you're not going into this with zero visibility. The most direct and quick way to begin understanding the health of your newly created BI database server is to understand where they may live. There are some solutions to view performance. However, Power BI logs these within itself, which can be tricky to dig yourself out of once problems start to pop up on all your new servers, all new connections, as well as your database tables.

Troubleshooting is key. Power BI dashboards could slow for hundreds of unique root causes - not all obvious when they occur. For instance, any number of things need to be done just for one new database to live for others to use via Power BI. However, an ETL developer might not realize there are many other tasks that still need to be done on the Power BI platform side, with Azure itself, or that a server in some remote data center could just be down with zero knowledge by its parent company, Microsoft, and their support team.

So What Is The Entirety Amount A Person Will Spend Building Any Power BI Gateway?

The One-Off, Non-Technical End User:

For a basic on-premise gateway installation by one user with zero plans to expand or get technical for any reasons with anything they build, your entire process takes minutes (perhaps 35 minutes maximum). Then again, maintenance itself is just a click away inside the Power BI Data Platform. So again, a solution built to address only one singular business problem within one singular team who aren't technical just yet couldn't be less complicated, but the technical depth required to scale beyond something basic quickly turns into a much more serious level of complexity, planning required by you and your data team from every step along the way on projects of this scale.

Smaller, Tighter IT-Led or BI Led Teams

Building More Technical Solutions At A Midsize Enterprise

You want to take your solution in a larger company but need more support at many of the stages we discussed today. You likely manage a few people who are just starting out with Power BI without any expertise. So our solution might need some internal communication on top of what you would likely do by yourself at home, just not at the same scale and need to do as thorough a job for business to accept your designs and final deliverable dashboard solution on Power BI from both a development and security perspective. Your CFO in-house needs to sign off as well, which alone means a few meetings or planning sessions likely need to occur before this much larger scale of project is able to actually go live. And it might have new design and technical specs at the very end when everyone thinks they might have agreed on one version previously, just now realizing later down the line a much larger set of issues now for your business and its goals with this new report or analytics tools for your business unit.

Final Thoughts

The work involved in setting up and maintaining a Power BI Data Gateway ranges from trivial to a significant task that requires a large IT team and project management. For an individual or a small team, installation can take less than a day to properly manage and sustain. All this depends on what scale you plan to take your analysis into the future. An individual with no team to scale solutions beyond one day of work can get up and going very quickly, just a download and a sync from the Power BI Gateway.

While gateways solve the on-premises puzzle for tools like Power BI, they don’t address the other headache: getting a unified view when your data is spread across a half-dozen other cloud platforms. At Graphed, we focus on instantly connecting your crucial cloud apps in seconds to simplify this. Instead of juggling a connection to Salesforce, setting up access for Shopify, and logging into Google Analytics separately, you can connect them all and use simple conversational questions to create entire dashboards in under a minute. Start your project today with Graphed on our web application for analysis and dashboard building or any other general analytics solution.