The on-premises gateway is a bridge that provide a secure data transfer between on-premises data and Microsoft cloud services like Power BI.

In today’s post we will discuss how to configure a proxy for On-Premises data Gateway to communicate with Power BI.

So how do you determine if a proxy is blocking your Gateway connection?

1. Run the network ports test. The results of the test will either be (Success) or (Failed). If you see failed result, it means your network environment is blocking the required ports.
2. Check if firewall is not blocking the connection by making sure that the IP addresses for your region are unblock for your data centers. You can get a list of Azure IP addresses from this website. To find your current data center region, see Set the data center region.
3. Check if you have proxy on your network.

There are three configuration files to edit for the On-premises data gateway to communicate via Proxy. The files can be found in the default gateway installation location:

C:\ProgramFiles\On-premises data gateway\enterprisegatewayconfigurator.exe.config

C:\ProgramFiles\On-premises datagateway\Microsoft.PowerBI.EnterpriseGateway.exe.config

C:\ProgramFiles\On-premises datagateway\m\Microsoft.Mashup.Container.NetFX45.exe.config

Step One

• Open the first config file with visual studio or any text editor from the following location as seeing in the screenshot below:

 C:\Program Files\On-premises data gateway\enterprisegatewayconfigurator.exe.config

When you open the file, you will see a default proxy configuration setting like the below screenshot. The default configuration works with Windows authentication.

Please contact your network admin to confirm if your proxy uses another form of authentication and change it. Note that Basic authentication is not recommended. Using basic proxy authentication might cause proxy authentication errors that result in the gateway not being properly configured.

• Add a <proxy> element to the xml configuration file above and replace the IP Address and Port number as seeing below, save the file in the same location.

The following example configuration specifies that all requests must go through a proxy with the IP address 192.168.1.10 and port 3128

Step Two

• Repeat step one for second file. The second file can be found in the same location

 C:\ProgramFiles\On-premises data gateway\Microsoft.PowerBI.EnterpriseGateway.exe.config

Step Three

If you want your gateway to connect to cloud data sources through a proxy, you need to edit the third file also.

• Open the third file from the following location:

C:\ProgramFiles\On-premises datagateway\m\Microsoft.Mashup.Container.NetFX45.exe.config

• Expand the <configuration> section and include the following contents as seeing in screenshot below.
• Replace the IP address and port number and save file in the same location.

If you configure the proxy settings to use default credentials, you need to change the service account to an authenticated domain user account (Domain\userid) of the gateway to allow proper authentication with the proxy.

Step Four

• Using a command prompt, stop and start the On-Premises Gateway service so the changes can take effect.

net stop PBIEgwService

net start PBIEgwService

Step Five

• Open Gateway app and sign in, go to Diagnostics, and do the network port test again by clicking Start new test.

If the result of the port test is successful, it means your gateway connected to all the required ports successfully.

Happy Gateway administration 🙂