Surge protection in Microsoft Fabric has been a key feature for managing capacity usage and preventing overload. Today, it helps you:
- Limit background compute consumption at the capacity level, setting thresholds for when background operations are rejected and when they recover.
- Reduce deep throttling states with longer recover time by engaging throttling earlier to enable admins to take preventive action and reducing recovery times.
Until now, surge protection applied only at the capacity level—meaning all workspaces shared the same rules.
What’s new: workspace-level surge protection
We’re taking surge protection to the next level with workspace-level controls. This update gives you more granular management of compute usage across your organization.
Key enhancements
- Per-workspace CU % limits: Define a compute unit (CU) consumption threshold that applies to all workspaces, as a percentage of overall capacity utilization. These are set over a rolling 24-hour period.
- Automatic blocking: When a workspace exceeds its threshold, it can be automatically placed in a blocked state, rejecting new operations until usage drops or the block expires.
- Mission critical mode: Designate high-priority workspaces as mission critical—exempting them from surge protection rules—effectively prioritizing them over other workspaces. This mode can also be used to remove an active blocked state.
Why this matters
With workspace-level surge protection, you can:
- Prevent resource over-utilization by lower-priority workspaces.
- Keep more important workspaces running, minimizing interruptions.
- Maintain a balanced and predictable experience for all users.
This update builds on the foundation of capacity-level surge protection, giving you fine-grained control to optimize performance and protect your most important solutions. We have also added a view for this in the Capacity Metrics App to ensure transparency.
Learn more
Explore the Surge protection and Understand the metrics app compute page resources for more information.