Power BI report stopped refreshing? A gateway and connection troubleshooting playbook

This is a common situation. Someone builds a Power BI report that reads on-premises data through a gateway, it works for months, and then it quietly stops refreshing. The author has moved on or is away, the schedule has switched itself off, the failure emails go to an inbox nobody reads, and the people using the report see old numbers.

The usual first guess is that the gateway is broken. Often it is not. A saved sign-in expired, an account lost access to a source, or the only person who could change the settings is gone. This article is the path from “the report stopped updating” to a report that refreshes again and has an owner who will keep it that way.

Takeaways

How the pieces fit

A refresh works only when everything lines up: the gateway computer is on, every source maps to a connection, every connection has working credentials, and the owner may use every connection.

Step 1. Read the error

Open the semantic model’s Settings > Refresh and click Show details.

Then open Refresh history. The first failure after a run of successes holds the real cause.

Step 2. Give yourself access

The workspace

Workspaces you are not a member of do not appear anywhere, including search. Open the admin portal at https://app.powerbi.com/admin-portal/workspaces, find the workspace, click … and then Access, and add yourself.

Or in PowerShell:

Connect-PowerBIServiceAccount
Add-PowerBIWorkspaceUser -Scope Organization -Id <workspace-id> -UserPrincipalName you@contoso.com -AccessRight Admin

The gateways

Open Manage connections and gateways at https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/gateways and switch on Tenant administration. Without it, you only see the gateways you already administer.

The round arrows in the Status column are buttons. Click them to check which gateways are online.

To manage one, click … then Manage users on its row and give yourself a role.

The connections

This step catches most people. Being a gateway Admin does not let you use the connections other people created on that gateway. When you take over a model, its sources show Add to gateway instead of a dropdown:

Do not click Add to gateway. It creates duplicate connections and asks for every password again. Go to the Connections tab instead, click … then Manage users on each connection, and add yourself as Owner or User. Press F5 and the dropdowns appear.

Step 3. Find the computer that runs the gateway

Open the gateway in Manage connections and gateways. The Device column is the computer name.

Once a model is mapped, its settings show the same thing as “Running on”:

For every gateway at once, the DataGateway module works:

Install-Module DataGateway -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-DataGatewayServiceAccount
foreach ($c in Get-DataGatewayCluster -Scope Organization) {
    foreach ($m in $c.MemberGateways) {
        '{0,-30} {1}' -f $c.Name, ($m.Annotation | ConvertFrom-Json).gatewayMachine
    }
}

Then confirm in Intune or Entra ID who that computer belongs to. Gateways often end up on the report author’s desktop. Power BI shows them as online and healthy until the day the desktop is switched off, reimaged or replaced.

Step 4. Find what uses a gateway or a connection

The portal shows connections but not which reports use them. The admin Scanner API does. It returns every model in a set of workspaces with its data sources and their gateway IDs:

$ws   = Invoke-PowerBIRestMethod -Url 'admin/workspaces/modified' -Method Get | ConvertFrom-Json | ForEach-Object { $_ }
$body = @{ workspaces = @($ws[0..99].id) } | ConvertTo-Json
$scan = Invoke-PowerBIRestMethod -Url 'admin/workspaces/getInfo?datasourceDetails=True' -Method Post -Body $body | ConvertFrom-Json
# Poll admin/workspaces/scanStatus/<scan id> until it says Succeeded, then read the result:
$res  = Invoke-PowerBIRestMethod -Url "admin/workspaces/scanResult/$($scan.id)" -Method Get | ConvertFrom-Json
$res.datasourceInstances | Where-Object gatewayId -eq '<gateway-id>'

Join datasourceInstances back to each dataset’s datasourceUsages to get the report names and owners. Scan in batches of 100 workspaces.

Two things to look for in the result:

• Connections on a gateway that no model uses are leftovers. They can be cleaned up later.
• A gateway ID that no admin page shows, with every model on it owned by the same person, is a personal-mode gateway. That is the only way an admin can see one.

The ForEach-Object { $_ } matters on Windows PowerShell 5.1. There, ConvertFrom-Json returns a top-level JSON array as one object, and your loop runs once.

Step 5. Find when it last refreshed successfully

For one model, the Refresh section shows the last successful refresh and the next one.

For every model on a Premium or Fabric capacity, one admin call returns the last refresh of each:

$r = Invoke-PowerBIRestMethod -Url 'admin/capacities/refreshables?$top=1000&$expand=group' -Method Get | ConvertFrom-Json
$r.value | Select-Object name, configuredBy, @{ n = 'Status'; e = { $_.lastRefresh.status } }, @{ n = 'Ended'; e = { $_.lastRefresh.endTime } }

To see who did what in the last 30 days (refreshes, takeovers, credential changes, exports), read the activity log one day at a time:

Get-PowerBIActivityEvent -StartDateTime '2026-10-27T00:00:00' -EndDateTime '2026-10-27T23:59:59' |
    ConvertFrom-Json | ForEach-Object { $_ } |
    Where-Object Activity -match 'TakeOver|Refresh|Gateway|Datasource' |
    Select-Object CreationTime, UserId, Activity, ItemName

The activity log also shows how many people open each report. If there are two copies of the same report, check both before deciding one of them does not matter.

Step 6. Take over the semantic model

Before you click Take over, check how the model connects. This one used its owner’s personal cloud connection, which a takeover drops:

After the takeover, the gateway mapping is empty:

Click the arrow next to the gateway, pick a connection in every Maps to dropdown, select the gateway’s radio button, and click Apply. Leave the Cloud connections row empty when the same source is already mapped through the gateway.

Step 7. Fix the credentials

The model’s Data source credentials section shows which connections fail their test:

To fix one, open the connection’s Settings, click Edit credentials, sign in, and click Save:

For a SharePoint AccessUnauthorized, check the account on the site with Check Permissions. Check the list too, because lists can have their own permissions:

Watch for files in a person’s home folder, such as an Excel lookup table. Their connection usually holds that person’s Windows password, which breaks when the password changes. After a takeover every mapped connection has to pass its test, so one forgotten file can block the whole refresh. The real fix is to move the file to SharePoint and change the query in Power BI Desktop.

Step 8. Turn the schedule back on

Run Refresh now first. Only when it completes, turn the schedule on, check the time zone, and replace departed people in the notification contacts.

Handing it over

The fix leaves the model running under the admin’s account. To move it to someone who will stay:

1. Give them access to the data, for example the SharePoint site.
2. Make them Admin on the gateway and Owner on each connection the model uses.
3. They click Take over, map the sources, and click Apply.
4. They re-sign the SharePoint connection with their own account.
5. They run Refresh now and turn the schedule on.

Keeping it healthy

• Before fixing anything, open the link the users actually use. Copies of the same report in different workspaces are common, and the one people use is not always the one you find first.
• Run the Scanner API early. It shows personal gateways, leftover connections and every report that depends on a gateway in one list.
• Treat any gateway on a desktop as temporary. Move it to a server with at least two admins, sign connections with a service account, and give each model a named owner who reads the failure emails.