Forum Discussion

Koen's avatar
Koen
Frequent Visitor
5 years ago

How to automatically allocate Power Premium Capacity costs based on usage to cost centers?

Background
A client of mine has purchased multiple Power BI Premium SKUs to host their activities. A workspace gets created by an employee and requests Premium Capacity for it. A Power BI Admin adds the workspace to one of the nodes. All fine.

 

However, as the load increases, requesting a new workspace becomes more difficult. You have to prove that you're load does not jeopardize critical reporting loads.

 

The other thing is that they want to split the costs of Power BI Premium to different cost centers. The premium capacity is now a free-for-all.

 

Proposed solution
So I thought Microsoft offers Capacity Usage and detailed logging.
Combining this with the CMDB, which registers which workspace belongs to which cost center, we can make reports on the cost per action.

 

With this insight, the business can optimize their solution themselves.
For example, if a report developer wants to refresh their 10 GB on-premise dataset each hour with ten active users, their costs will be much higher than, let's say, a weekly updated report of 500 MB with 500 active users.

 

Discussion
I can imagine that there are many ways to go about it. I'm curious how other corporates are solving this issue. Do you have a less technical solution for this? Or maybe you have already implemented this and can share some learnings.

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4 Replies

    • Koen's avatar
      Koen
      Frequent Visitor
      5 years ago

      That is not really what we are after. It has nothing to do with the size of the SKU, but with the usage per department. Where department --> workspace. So if a department requests a Power BI Premium workspace, the associated usage is billed to that department as well. Then they can make an informed choice whether to ask for Power BI Premium backed workspaces or go for individual Power BI Pro / PPU licenses.

      • v-janeyg-msft's avatar
        v-janeyg-msft
        Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support
        5 years ago

        Hi, Koen 

         

        Automatic allocation is impossible. But you can actively allocate user and workspace in the capacity setting to use premium capacity.

         

        Best Regards

        Janey Guo

         

        If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    4 years ago

    Is there any approach from Microsoft how to do a fair and effective costsplitting for different cost centers or departments based on usage or user? I am facing the same question at the moment: How can we split the montly premium costs to the different departments.