Fabric metrics app / monitor CU usage

[Bendik]

Hello!

We are trying to monitor our usage of CU's, but we are running into some issues. AFAIK the place to view this is via installing the microsoft fabric capacity metrics app. When me team members try to open the app, we all get the message that we need a power bi pro liscense as well. Is this true? Do we have to pay for pbi pro licenses to monitor our CU usage, or is there another way? 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bendik 

When you install the Fabric Capacity Metrics App, it will automatically create a Pro workspace for you and install the related Power BI report and semantic model into this workspace. The Fabric Capacity Metrics App itself is a Power BI template app, which is a Power BI feature, so you need a license that allows you to use Power BI features.

Therefore, you need at least a Pro license. If you don't have that, you can apply for a personal trial license, which will also allow you to use all Power BI features within 60 days. Once you have installed the app, you can move the related workspace to Fabric (F64 or above) or Fabric Trial capacity. 

From a cost-saving perspective, if you want to use this app to monitor Fabric capacity usage, I recommend obtaining a Pro license for the Fabric capacity administrator. This is because only the capacity administrator can connect this app to the capacity they manage. Additionally, keep the workspace in the Pro capacity and do not move it to the paid Fabric capacity.

Reference: Per user licenses

Otherwise, we can look forward to new features that might offer new options and experiences.

Best Regards,
Jing
Community Support Team

[frithjof_v]

You could try to assign the Fabric Capacity Metrics App to a Fabric Capacity of F64 or higher, or Premium capacity of P1 or higher, if you have. Then, the viewers don't need pro license, they can be free users.

Perhaps the Owner of the app will need to have pro licence anyway. But the users of the report can have free license if the app is in a capacity workspace of F64 (or P1) and above.

Note that the Metrics app will be unavailable if the Capacity which the workspace is assigned to enters throttling state. In that case, you will need to assign the workspace to another capacity, or pro.

If you have access to trial, you can assign the capacity metric app's workspace to a trial capacity. You also don't need pro if you have trial license. But the trial will just be temporary. 

[Bendik]

Right, we will probably move to a higher capacity over time, but moving the capacity to 64 is quite a large investement. 
Is there a common way of setting up monitoring for your capacity in something like grafana? I'm not super pleased if monitoring is only available via a power BI license or F64 capacity, as both are rather costly? 

[frithjof_v]

The Power BI pro license is 10 USD per user per month. So if 1 user needs access to the Metrics App, it will be 10 USD per month.

I'm not sure if it would be possible to extract the metrics data without having a pro license. You could try to move it to any Fabric capacity, and use semantic link to query the Fabric Capacity Metrics App semantic model. However I'm wondering if the Owner will need a pro license anyway. I'm not sure, tbh.

The underlying data source for the Fabric Capacity Metrics App semantic model is a Kusto database which is managed by Microsoft, I think. This is where all the Metrics are kept. I believe Fabric emits telemetry data which is stored in this Kusto database. 

Another solution is on the roadmap, where monitoring data will be made available inside Fabric: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/fabric/release-plan/admin-governance#fabric-monitoring