We’re excited to announce Surge Protection for background operations is now Generally Available (GA). Using surge protection, capacity admins can limit overuse by background operations in their capacities.
What is surge protection?
Surge protection helps protect capacities from excess usage by background operations. It acts as a resource governor, rejecting background operations when the capacity reaches a limit set by the capacity admin. Use surge protection to limit the amount of background usage on the capacity. This helps protect interactive operations like viewing reports and allows the capacity to self-heal faster if there is overuse.
How can I start using surge protection?
Surge protection is configured in the per capacity settings page. It’s available for Microsoft Fabric Capacity (F SKU), Power BI Premium (P SKU), Power BI Embedded (A SKU), and EM SKUs. With the General Availability release, we have streamlined the user interface for a more simplified experience.
To enable surge protection, follow these steps:
- Open the Fabric Admin Portal.
- Navigate to Capacity settings.
- Select a capacity.
- Expand Surge protection.
- Set Background Operations to On.
- Set a Rejection threshold.
- Set a Recovery threshold.
- Select Apply.
For an example of how surge protection works, head over the example in our previous blog - Announcing Surge Protection (Preview).
Key considerations as you start using surge protection.
- Surge protection’s background operation rejection threshold is not a hard limit on 24-hour background percentage. This is because surge protection rejects new operations but doesn’t cancel jobs in progress. You’ll see that the 24-hour background percentage goes up beyond the background rejection threshold as those in progress jobs complete. The amount it goes beyond the threshold depends on your capacity’s usage pattern.
- If you’re trying to eliminate interactive rejections or delays by using surge protection, you’ll need to tune your background operations rejection thresholds. This could take several iterations to set the values that work best for your capacity. The surge protection documentation provides examples to get started.
- Surge protection rejects background operations. Many UI experiences in Fabric use background operations or depend on background operations to complete. These will also be rejected when surge protection is active.
Lastly, it’s important to use surge protection alongside best practice approaches like optimizing and scaling-out capacities. Your best defense against throttling is a correctly sized capacity. If you have mission critical solutions, it’s best to put them in a dedicated capacity that’s sized correctly for the expected usage.
We’re excited to take this first step on the surge protection journey. We’d love to hear your feedback. If you have suggestions to improve surge protection, head over to our ideas page.
Next Steps