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If you’ve ever tried to expose your Power BI Report Server to the internet, you’ve probably run into a few headaches—especially when it comes to authentication. Let’s walk through the typical setup, the challenges, and how modern identity platforms like Okta can help bridge the gap between legacy and modern authentication. The Reverse Proxy Setup When you want to make internal services like Power BI Report Server accessible from the internet, the go-to approach is a reverse proxy. Think of…

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Deploying Power BI Report Server in a SQL Server Availability Group (AG) is a great way to boost resilience and uptime. But there’s a catch: Power BI Report Server itself isn’t AG-aware. That means when a failover happens, things can get messy—especially with SQL Agent jobs. The Problem with Failover When the AG fails over to a secondary node: The Fix: Add a Primary Check Step to Agent Jobs To avoid this, you can add a check step to each…

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Running into a “Service Unavailable” error when accessing your Power BI Report Server? You’re not alone. This issue can be frustrating, especially when everything else seems to be configured correctly. One common cause is incomplete URL reservations in http.sys. This is especially relevant if your Report Server is set up to respond to multiple addresses, like in a scale-out deployment or an Availability Group setup (see my previous post: Power BI Report Server: Managing Multi-Homed URLs in an Availability Group…

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Running Power BI Report Server in a high-availability setup can be a bit tricky—especially when you want it to respond to multiple URLs. A common scenario is when the Report Server is installed on nodes that are part of a SQL Server Availability Group (AG). Why Multiple URLs Matter In this setup, each server should be reachable via its own hostname, but the primary node of the AG should also be accessible via the AG listener name. This ensures that…

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Managing permissions in Power BI Report Server can feel like navigating a maze. Just like in Windows, you can assign permissions to folders or individual items, and you can even break inheritance at any level to redefine access. While this flexibility is great, it can quickly become hard to manage—especially in larger environments. Keep It Simple: Best Practices for Permission Management Here’s my recommendation: If you’re new to this topic, check out Microsoft’s documentation:Roles and permissions in Reporting Services –…

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Keeping an eye on your Power BI Report Server jobs can be a bit of a black box—until now. To make monitoring easier, I’ve built a paginated report that lists all ReportServer jobs, including both automated data refreshes and subscriptions for paginated reports. Big thanks to P. Theriault for the error criteria inspiration and to Alexander Korn for laying the groundwork with the base view! What the Report Does The report pulls job execution data from the ReportServer database and…

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When exposing a Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) to external users over the internet, the typical setup involves placing it behind a reverse proxy. This allows for SSL termination, clean URLs, and better control over access. If you’re unfamiliar with reverse proxies, here’s a good overview: Reverse Proxy – Wikipedia. In our setup, everything worked fine when accessing the ReportServer directly from the internal network. But as soon as users tried to access it via the reverse proxy from the…

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Disclaimer This article was created based on my personal notes with support from Microsoft Copilot. While Copilot assisted in structuring and refining the content, all technical details have been carefully reviewed and developed by me. So, I’ve got a talk coming up about Power BI Report Server, and naturally, I needed a local test environment to play around with. I figured I’d document the setup here—not just for my own future reference, but maybe it’ll help someone else out there…

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