Is having a lot of Premium workspaces a bad thing? Is there a cost impact?

[Anonymous]

Hi PBI Experts,

Is it a bad thing to have a lot of Premium workspaces? Is there an additional cost charged for each Premium workspace? If so, could you recommend best practices for avoiding the creation of multiple premium workspaces for different groups of audiences?

Thank you ahead of time!

Regards,

Madhan 

[v-yueyunzh-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi , @Anonymous According to my experience and research, for the Gen2 version of Premium Capacity, there is a feature called Auto Scale that automatically adds one or more v-cores depending on the load level of the capacity, which will charge some fees after the automatic increase of V-cores, but this feature can be turned on or off.

For your Premium capacity, in principle, there will be no charge after subscription and purchase, if you are worried that too many workspaces are assigned, too many users used by the workspace resulting in excessive load, there is a function that triggers Auto Scale, you can try to limit the users of the capacity in the capacity settings, and disable, according to the needs of the new workspace creation option, or only allow some users to create new workspaces, depending on your specific needs:

Using Autoscale with Power BI Premium - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Configure and manage capacities in Power BI Premium - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Thank you for your time and sharing, and thank you for your support and understanding of PowerBI! 

Best Regards,

Aniya Zhang

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[vanessafvg]

Premium is managed via total capacity so essentially its about managing load.  It makes sense to have a strategy about it regarding who has a need for premium or just a normal pro license. 

Premium capacity is the total load across your whole capacity, so whether that is in one work space or 2, it probably doesn't make that much difference but might if you have auto scaling. However it depends on if the workspace requires it, so best to check some reporting on whether your capacity is being maxed.  There is a premium utilisation app you can install.

However I would think there are things you can do to improve the total load by focusing on best practises for performance, understanding query caching etc..