As promised today, this week we release the new self-service app for understanding your utilization of premium gen2 capacities – the most important tool to manage premium gen2 capacities. This app surfaces simple to understand utilization data that will highlight the drivers for your capacity’s utilization, help you plan your capacity needs and respond to changes in demand with confidence.
if you are a capacity admin, you can get the app here or by clicking the “get app” button and searching for “Premium Utilization Metrics”
Once installing the app, you will have to refresh its data to obtain data from your Premium Gen2 capacity. To do this, launch the app in Power BI after its installed and click the “connect to your data” message on the top of the report. You will be ask to supply 2 parameters:
1. your capacity ID (your capacity ID shows up in the URL of your capacity’s admin page)
2. How many days of utilization data you want to see in your report. Choose the right value to fit your analysis needs. i.e. if you are interested in doing internal monthly chargebacks for users of your capacity, choose 7 days 30 or 45 days to view the relevant data.
Submit the parameters and the app will refresh. The refresh operation may take several minutes to complete.
When the app is refreshed, open the report and interact with it to learn about utilization patterns on your capacity. On the right you will find 2 charts when you open the report:
I. A bar combo chart visual showing how many cores you had each day (as the bars), and what was the top value of utilization recorded that day (as the line). you can interact with this chart by clicking any bar. clicking will filter the whole report (right and left sides) to that day.
II. A horizontal column chart visual showing how utilization is broken down between the workspaces on your capacity. This visual can help you establish internal charge backs inside your organization by attributing proportional costs to the amount of utilization in all the workspace a certain business unit may have.
To understand utilization patterns through each day, click on any day in the bar combo chart. the right side of the report will reveal the utilization patterns through the day in 15 minute data points. Be sure to look for the spinny in the top left for each visual as it typically takes time to render these visuals due to the high volume of data.
Through the report you will find 2 types of utilization from various artifacts. Interactive and Background. Interactive operations are all operations that are report views and interactions that are rendered in real time. Background operations are all refreshes of datasets and dataflows.
Background operations are typically very spikey in CPU utilization and takes a long time to complete. This is why utilization of background operations is spread over 24 hours from the time they completed. You will see a light blue line in the chart describing the overall background utilization value changing subtly through the day due to the 24 hour spread of each operation.
Interactive utilization is accounted for right when the operation completed. Our utilization evaluation mechanisms make sure no single operation will exceed your capacity, and if an interactive operation’s utilization is high enough to do so, its cost is spread over the next following minutes. A dark blue line in the chart represents your interactive utilization through the day
The summary visuals in the bottom right immediately informs what the maximum utilization that day was, at what time and how much of it was interactive.
Ctrl-click on each data point on the top right chart to see a list of artifacts that attributed your capacity’s utilization during that 15 minute timespan in the table below the chart. notice the table will include the artifact (dataset, dataflow paginated report), the operation and the user that initiated it so if need be, you can investigate with that user what did they do etc.
The utilization app’s dataset is available for users who want to build customized reports and connect to utilization data from other reports.
The app is refreshed nightly.
As always, be sure to review the documentation
Happy Utilization Reporting!