Power BI is about making informed, data driven decisions and we believe this should include how you maintain your premium capacities in Power BI. Now we are very pleased to announce the preview launch of the Premium Capacity Monitoring App! This app supports capacity in monitoring the health of premium capacities and making sound decisions about the best use of them and when to scale them so that your users get the best possible experience.
Today, we want to highlight some of the most indicative metrics which will provide an easy and informative way for Power BI capacity admins to monitor and identify issues in capacities. You can see a comprehensive view of dataset refreshes, dataset evictions and queries in the capacity for the past 7 days. These metrics, along with the system metrics, give a more in-depth view into the health of a capacity.
Let’s get started by installing the service app.
The app can be installed by searching for “Power BI Premium Capacity Monitoring” in the Power BI apps or by clicking here to get it now (please ensure that you are an admin of at least one capacity before installing the app. Power BI Admin is not enough to see the capacity details).
Click get it now to install the application into your workspace.
Now you have the app installed and can see metrics about all the capacities in your organization for which you are an admin of. Let’s take a look at some of the key new metrics now available.
Diving into the Premium Capacity Monitoring App:
Click on the app to open it. Once open you will see a dashboard which shows an aggregated summary of all the capacities that you are an admin of.
Click on any tile to open the more detailed report.
The first tab of the report is the Filter tab, which allows you to optionally select a specific capacity or dataset to explore for all the following pages in this report. If nothing is selected, the report will show every capacity you are an admin of.
The Summary tab shows the high-level view of the capacity metrics breakdown by entities, system, and workloads filter by the selections made on the first tab.
The Refreshes tab shows successful refresh count, refresh failure count, the average duration and wait times of dataset refreshes by hour. Long refresh wait times, can be a sign that a capacity is becoming busy. A refresh will wait when there are not enough resources (memory or CPU) available for it to start. These resources may be consumed by other refreshes or queries being run on the capacity. Refreshes can be broken out by dataset name and workspace name.
Coming very soon, the queries tab shows all queries and the average duration they ran for. This can be broken down by hour, dataset and workspace. Long query durations could be a sign that the capacity is busy. It may also mean that a single dataset is causing problems and further investigation is needed.
NOTE: query metrics are not currently available with the initial launch of the app (on 8/30/2018). Expect to see them show up in the weeks following the launch.
The Dataset tab shows total datasets evicted due to memory pressure by hour. The line on the chart represents the average memory consumption. Eviction is a normal process to clean up unused dataset from memory to make room for new datasets which are actively being used. Unused datasets will be evicted when new datasets need to be queried or refreshed. See how Power BI Premium works for more information.
The System tab shows the times of CPU high utilization (represented by the number of times the CPU exceeded 80% utilization), Direct Query/Live connections high utilization, and memory consumption. These can be correlated with metrics on the other tabs to see what activity was going on during those time periods.
With these metrics, you can make more informed decisions and truly manage your premium capacities, workspaces, datasets and workloads in your organization. These metrics are just the start. More detailed metrics and tooling will become available in the following weeks and months. Submit your ideas for more metrics.
Learn more about what Power BI premium is, managing premium capacities and understand how Power BI Premium works.
Watch “Deploying and managing Microsoft Power BI Premium capacities to your entire organization” from the Microsoft Business Application Summit to see how to use these new reports.
Using Premium Capacity Monitoring app to monitor Power BI Embedded
This same app can be used to monitor any A SKU capacities you may have in Power BI embedded. The will show up in the report as long as you are an admin of the capacity. However, refresh of the report will fail unless you grant certain permissions to to Power BI on your A SKUs. This can be done by opening your capacity in the Azure portal, clicking on Access control (IAM) and adding the “Power BI Premium” app to the reader role. If you are unable to find the app by name, you can also add it by its client Id: cb4dc29f-0bf4-402a-8b30-7511498ed654.
