How to connect to URC using PowerBI online / via Office365
How to connect
To connect to URC from PowerBI online please follow this article.
You will need to be an administrator for your tenant to make this change if it is not active. If you are not, you will need to contact your organisations IT team. Unfortunately this is not something Gladstone can do.
Please note all user accounts connecting to the Gladstone platform have IP whitelisting enabled. This is a process where you can only connect to your reporting warehouse from a pre-approved location provided by your networking team.
Note: Since June 2024 and in response to a high profile issue with Santander IP whitelisting has been enforced for all user accounts connecting to Snowflake within the Gladstone platform. This has been done to provide the highest level of security to our customers.
I am having issues connecting
If you are able to connect to the service locally on your PC but not via PowerBI online the most common case is because you are not using a data gateway. As all URC instances are IP whitelisted, the IP's used for PowerBI online are not approved on your account. This is usually the case when using cloud services to access locked down and restricted resources, especially PII. To allow PowerBI online to work you will need to route all your traffic through a "data gateway" which provides a secure, authorised connection to the data source - these are built into PowerBI as a standard tool and easy enough to setup if you have the correct permissions.
To explain where these sit between you and the URC, in the example below, the top flow in RED will not work. The connection is refused because the traffic has an address which is not authorised in URC. The GREEN flow will work however because the data gateway is installed within your network and provides an IP address which is unique to your organisation and is whitelisted against your URC install.
To install a data gateway, please follow this article. Once configured, if the IP address is already whitelisted you just need to tell PowerBI to route all traffic through the gateway. If not, follow the "Adding an approved locations" section below.
Note: You may need to change config on your semantic model to tell it to use the data gateway. This is not always done by default depending how your administrator has setup the gateway. Contact your administrator if your having issues.
Adding an approved location
To add another approved IP address to connect to your reporting warehouse, please submit a ticket to our support desk who will be happy to add this for you. Please make sure you have the authorisation ability to do this as we can only accept changes to security policy from approved contacts.
Why can't you just whitelist the PowerBI IP addresses?
These IP address ranges are shared and not unique to your organisation. This would mean your data would be accessible by anyone using the PowerBI service in Azure and therefore only protected by the username and password your using.
Can I use my Azure AD for user accounts now I am using PowerBI online?
Yes - this is possible. We do not ship this as default but it can be enabled on your URC account. Once done, you will be able to use Azure AD Authentication to login and authenticate with your URC connection. If you would like to enable this, please contact Gladstone support and provide your Azure Tenant ID along with the email addresses of all users who need to connect via this method. Please note, you will still need a data gateway to access your data, you just don't need a shared account anymore and access is now controlled by your AD.