Forum Discussion
Power BI Service: DirectQuery (Kusto) visuals fail online but work fine in Desktop
Hi Semail,
Thank you for the detailed response. Here the issue is related to the DirectQuery in the service because of the strict resource and concurrency limits compared to desktop. Since each visual sends its own query, multiple complex visuals running in parallel can exceed those limits and error occurs.
Since kusto changes are limited in your case, please try the below steps on the power bi side:
- Reduce the number of visuals per page to limit parallel queries
- Simplify DAX measures to avoid complex query translation
- Avoid high cardinality slicers and heavy cross filtering
- If possible, consider a hybrid model like Import with DirectQuery to reduce the load
Thanks and regards,
Anjan Kumar Chippa
Option 1) Enable query result caching
In Power BI Service semantic model settings → DirectQuery → enable Query caching. This serves repeated identical queries from cache rather than hitting Kusto every time, dramatically reducing concurrent load.
Option 2) Optimize the KQL queries generated by your DAX measures
Open DAX Studio, connect to your semantic model, and use Server Timings to capture the KQL queries Power BI sends to Kusto. Long-running or unoptimized KQL is the most common cause of QueryTimeoutExceeded. Simplify measures that generate complex nested KQL, avoid high-cardinality slicers that force full scans, and use pre-aggregated materialized views in Kusto where possible.
Option 3) Consider materialized views or pre-aggregation in Kusto
For FinOps data that aggregates large cost datasets, create Kusto materialized views that pre-aggregate the most common query patterns. Power BI then hits the materialized view instead of scanning raw data, which reduces both latency and resource consumption significantly.