Reliable and resilient Power BI service

[harmve]

Power BI is a great and powerful tool. However, the Power BI service should be more reliable and resilient as it isn't available all the time. In the past few months it has been down quite a few times and often for more than a day affecting many corporations, users and day-to-day processes which I think isn't acceptable.

We (all Northern Europe tenants) had 3 outages in the past 48 days. This resulted in about 27 hours of downtime for our Power BI reports which is nearly 2.5% of the total time ... this is a far cry from the promised 99.9% availability (and that is excluding the major issue of 11 Dec which affected our reports partly but which took more than a week to get resolved). I don't think this is acceptable and Microsoft should address this. 

So please vote to request a reliable and resilient 24/7 service from Microsoft! 

In addition it would be good if Microsoft would be quicker to update their Power BI support page when there is an outage and also to give an estimate of time when to expect an issue to be resolved. It would also help as part of our communication to our users to give an explanation of why the outage happened or what the root cause is.

Based on our own experiences (tentant in North Europe) and of the wider Power BI community I compiled the following Power BI outage list:

Outage	Issue	Region	Comments
01-06-2020 10:58 PM to 01-07-2020 05:31 PM	Loading model schema issue	North Europe
12-11-2019 08:59 AM to 12-18-2019 11:14 PM	Reset to default issue	North Europe	Took more than a week to be resolved
12-06-2019 04:56 AM to ‎ 12-06-2019 06:33 AM	App.powerbi.com not loading	North America	Is this the same issue as previous two?
12-05-2019 05:29 AM to ‎12-05-2019 09:31 AM	Reports not loading	North America	Is this the same issue as the previous Europe & Asia one or a different one?
12-04-2019 07:54 PM to ‎ 12-05-2019 01:16 AM	Loading and caching issue	North Europe & Asia
10-22-2019 03:13 AM to 10-22-2019 07:31 AM	Application metadata and refresh issue	North Europe

Note that the above dates and times are based on entries made on the Power BI Community site and therefore only give an indication of the outage. The three issues from 4 Dec to 6 Dec might all relate to the same issue but is hard to tell. 

[chross]

@harmve We are still waiting for Microsoft to come back with the Root Cause Analysis of the "reset to default" issue once they deployed the fixed 3 weeks ago.  It's very frustrating that they haven't not provided that info to us yet!!!

[harmve]

Yes @chross  Microsoft doesn't seem to share that kind of information so definitely something they could improve on! 

[atomek1000]

We are having simmilar problems even running Premium P1 instances which completely freeze and no reports are availible.

[mike_honey]

+1 from me, it's become very glitchy in 2020. As they are clearly breaking their service commitment, they should be offering refunds to paying customers affected.

To add to the above:

- there was a wave of unexplained refresh failures across multiple tenants that I support in multiple regions over the last week or so. All issues disappeared within a couple of hours

- publishing from Power BI Desktop is generating duplicated datasets

- App tile is broken - click on it and nothing happens

Power BI Team - please lift your game.  Your service is critical to decision making at thousands of organisations.

[harmve]

We spoke with Microsoft a few weeks ago and they said that the planned outages on the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 were due to them moving the Power BI online service to more reliable backend virtual machines.  They were running on quite old kit and that was contributing to the reliability issues.  The unplanned outages were due to some components not having been moved yet or Microsoft attempting to move them while the service was running. There were some other components that were still moving this year but they didn't believe that would be disruptive to users. But given your experience @mike_honey that might not have been the case ... Note that our last issue was on 22 Jan 2020 (and we use the Microsoft's data centre in Dublin). 

[chross]

@mike_honey  We are also experiencing the same issue when clicking on app tiles, nothing is happening.  We have to clear our broswer history --> close the browser--> reopen it --> sign back into the service --> open apps and then finally we can launch an app when we click on the tile.  Once again we have to explain ourselves to the users 😞