Monitoring the Potential Cost impact of Autoscale in Premium Capacity.

[dbeavon3]

We enabled autoscale in premium capactity (p1).  Suddenly we no longer face throttling issues.  However I'm guessing we only replaced one type of issue with another.  I'm not looking forward to seeing the monthly bill from Microsoft. 

Is anyone aware of a tool that we might use to try to predict the impact on our monthly bill?

We have been watching the "capacity metrics" dashboard, but the behavior of autoscale can't be interpreted very easily.  Take the following image as an example.

When I click on autoscale in the legend, then a big yellow bar appeares over the utilization chart on the right....

... isn't easy to interpret the meaning of this graphic.  Should we expect the Power BI bill to be 2x or 20x, as compared to the bill that we were getting before we enabled autoscale. 

Any information would be appreciated.  Perhaps there is some other monitoring tool which is able to more specifically monitor our autoscale costs. 

[SaiTejaTalasila]

Hi @dbeavon3 ,

If you want to automate the auto scaling you can refer this articles -

https://medium.com/codex/automate-microsoft-fabric-capacity-scale-up-and-down-4c34a498fc97

https://www.biinsight.com/microsoft-fabric-automating-fabric-capacity-scaling/?amp=1

I hope it will be helpful.

Thanks,

Sai Teja 

[v-tianyich-msft]

Hi @dbeavon3 ,

No such tool seems to be available. Please consider turning on Autoscale when appropriate...as it will continue to work for 24 hours once turned on.
Using Autoscale with Power BI Premium - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Hope it helps!

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Scott Chang

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

[dbeavon3]

@v-tianyich-msft 

Thanks for the reply.

In the capacity metrics dashboard, how do I tell when the autoscale operations are taking effect?  The image I showed above does NOT seem to indicate that there have been any related operations.

Yet it is clear that enabling autoscale has avoided a lot of throttling issues that would have otherwise arisen in this P1 capacity.  You can see the large "interactive" spikes which happened at mid-day.  In the past those would have throttled our capacity for at least an hour.  So how do I visualize the autoscale operations which should be credited for avoiding problems?

I'd like to have a way to confirm that autoscale is taking an effect, so that we don't have unpleasant surprises when we receive the monthly bill.

[v-tianyich-msft]

Hi @dbeavon3 ,

The essence of autoscale is to add the number of V-cores, you can check the number of V-cores in the capacity or calculate the CPU time to judge.

What is Power BI Premium? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Hope it helps!

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Scott Chang

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

[dbeavon3]

@v-tianyich-msft Thnaks for the response.

I'm not a PBI admin or capacity admin.  Just have visibility to see the metrics app.

I'm assuming that checking the number of v-cores is an admin screen that I won't have access to see.  Right?


I'd guess I can probably look at the CPU time, if there is no other obvious evidence of autoscale taking effect.

Can you please confirm that the autoscale line (yellow) shown in the legend of the the metrics app is not actually implemented?  That line appears to never move.  It seems like an obvious bug.  It is frustrating to customers when the dashboard implies we will see some autoscale information, yet it never appears.  If it was a well-known bug, would you tell me?

[v-tianyich-msft]

Hi @dbeavon3 ,

This is not a bug, when there is this yellow line, it means that autoscale has been enabled, because it lasts for 24 hours whether the load is exceeded or not.

Hope it helps!

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Scott Chang

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

[dbeavon3]

Hi @v-tianyich-msft 

Can you please share an example of a chart where the % autoscale is NOT showing 100%.  I have two capacities.  One of them is very unlikely to be using autoscale, and the other is very likely to be using it.  Yet there are no differences in the way the autoscale line is presented in that chart, as compared to the other capacity.  They both show a line across the top at 100%. 

This makes me nervous.  Not only the potential to be double-billed for the autoscale CU's, but that it is not possible to reliably know when autoscale is in effect. 

Is there an api to retrieve the recent history of these autoscale events?

[dbeavon3 · Accepted solution]

I finally observed the autoscale of the capacity.  It does indeed appear in the capacity metrics app

(V.1.2.1):