Forum Discussion
DirectLake CU Consumption
Hi tolgakurt ,
Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Community.Even though DirectLake is designed to minimize compute by directly reading from OneLake, certain factors can cause significant CU usage.
The first time a report is accessed, Power BI builds cache, loads metadata, and runs all visual queries, even hidden or non-visible visuals (tooltips, drill-through pages, etc.).
If visuals use non-aggregated or complex DAX, more data is scanned and if multiple pages are filtered and visuals are refreshed, this can be equivalent to 50–100+ queries, depending on the page complexity.
Ensure no unexpected refreshes or background operations were running.As long as you stay within your assigned capacity tier, there’s no extra cost beyond your base SKU rate. Monitoring daily average usage is still a good practice for long-term planning and sizing, especially when moving beyond the trial.
If your usage seems excessive compared to expected workloads, you might want to analyze query execution times and optimize your data model. You can find more details on Fabric trial capacity here Fabric trial capacity - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Understand the metrics app compute page - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
If our response addressed, please mark it as Accept as solution and click Yes if you found it helpful.Regards,
Chaithra.
Hi tolgakurt ,
Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Community.
Even though DirectLake is designed to minimize compute by directly reading from OneLake, certain factors can cause significant CU usage.
The first time a report is accessed, Power BI builds cache, loads metadata, and runs all visual queries, even hidden or non-visible visuals (tooltips, drill-through pages, etc.).
If visuals use non-aggregated or complex DAX, more data is scanned and if multiple pages are filtered and visuals are refreshed, this can be equivalent to 50–100+ queries, depending on the page complexity.
Ensure no unexpected refreshes or background operations were running.
As long as you stay within your assigned capacity tier, there’s no extra cost beyond your base SKU rate. Monitoring daily average usage is still a good practice for long-term planning and sizing, especially when moving beyond the trial.
If your usage seems excessive compared to expected workloads, you might want to analyze query execution times and optimize your data model. You can find more details on Fabric trial capacity here Fabric trial capacity - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Understand the metrics app compute page - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
If our response addressed, please mark it as Accept as solution and click Yes if you found it helpful.
Regards,