Connecting Power BI Gateway to Dremio
Brock Griffey
Overview
Often, customers using Dremio with Power BI have the need to move to Power BI Gateway . In order to set this up, customers will need to follow a few steps to get live connections with Dremio.
Requirements
- Dremio Cluster.
- System for PBI Gateway to run from (must be on 24x7 for live queries).
- Power BI Desktop (for publishing).
- Admin account for the Power BI website.
Setup Power BI Gateway with the Power BI Site
- Download & install the Dremio ODBC drivers. Make sure to checkmark the Power BI connector as well.
- Download Power BI Gateway.
- Install Power BI Gateway on the machine that will be running the bridge. The gateway must be available whenever a user interacts with the Power BI Dashboard on the Power BI website, otherwise queries will fail.
- Change the permission of the custom connector folder. Admin access is required to change the permissions.
- Go to the folder where the Dremio ODBC driver is installed. By default this is C:\Program Files\Dremio Connector:
- Right-click on Microsoft Power BI folder and select “Give access to” -> “Specific People…”
- On the Network Access dialog, type in “NT Service\PBIEgwService” and click “Add” to give the gateway service permission to read the directory.
- Click “Share” to share the directory, then click “Done”.
- Open the gateway software and navigate to the connectors section. Select the custom folder that the Dremio ODBC driver installed. By default this should be “C:\Program Files\Dremio Connector\Microsoft Power BI". Please ensure that the path ends with a “ \ “; otherwise the directory may not be found. Click “Accept” to change the path. The Dremio connector should show up now.
- Go to https://app.powerbi.com/
- Open “Settings”.
- Click the Manage gateways and select the gateway that was just installed.
- Check the “Allow user’s custom data connectors to refresh through this gateway cluster”.
- Click “Add data source to use the gateway”.
- Name your data source and select Dremio from the Data Source Type dropdown.
- Fill out the connection information.
- Set the encryption to Not Encrypted.
- Save.
Setup a Dashboard and publish
- Create a simple VDS in Dremio.
- Open the VDS in Power BI Desktop and create a simple workbook to be published.
- Make sure to sign into your Microsoft account.
- In Power BI Desktop click publish.
- Sign-in to https://app.powerbi.com/
Test Power BI live connection
- Open your workbook on the Power BI site.
- Verify the connection is submitting queries directly to Dremio.
- Open Dremio and check the jobs, make sure Power BI is submitting queries to Dremio.
After completing these steps, there should now be a live connection between the Power BI site and Dremio.