Fabric Capacity Under Control: Reduced Costs, Less Outages, Better User Experience

Description

Everyone struggles with rising Power BI capacity costs, rogue behaviors, outage risks, and badly designed reports reaching the platform. This session shows how predictive monitoring helps you prevent issues early and optimize for capacity costs. With Wiiisdom's insights, you'll keep Power BI stable, efficient, and delivering a better user experience.

Key Takeaways

• Prevent Outages, Ensure
• Key Concepts in Fabric Capacities
• A capacity = Reserved
• Called Capacity Units CUs
• Spikes and unpredictable
• Teams oversize SKUs "just to be
• Slow dashboards (~20 second

My Notes

Action Items

• [ ]

Resources & Links

Slides

Fabric Capacity Under
Control: Optimise Costs,
Prevent Outages, Ensure
User Experience
Patrick Perrier
EXPO SOLUTION THEATER
Thu 9:30 am – 9:50 am
VP of Product Management
at Wiiisdom
When too many
orders arrive, the
kitchen slows down.
The restaurant manager
steps in and shuts the
kitchen down.
Rush of simultaneous
orders causes longer
wait times.
Introduction to Fabric Capacities
Key Concepts in Fabric Capacities
Understanding Fabric Capacities
• A capacity = Reserved
block of compute (CPU,
Memory, Processing
Power)
Bigger SKU = Bigger
kitchen (F32, F64, F128).
More parallelism, more
throughput.
• Called Capacity Units CUs
Smaller SKU = Limited
Kitchen (A1, F2, Small).
When Overloaded:
• Slow Reports
Overload Easily.
• Failed Refreshes
• Possible Shutdowns
It’s not about Fabric being slow… It’s about the Kitchen being full.
Throttling – Consumption Debt
Workload > Capacity
Debt accrues . Debt repays over time
0%
100%+
Debt accrues when CU demand > capacity; repays over time.
Intraction Delays
~20-second delays for new
interactive actions
Debt Over Time
Interactive Rejections
Interactive operations fail;
user see errors
Background Rejections
Refreshes & background
jobs rejected – lasting
minutes to hours
Debt Accrual
Debt Repayment
No outages white debt < 100% . Outages begin once debt > 100% (Delays
Interactive Rejections
Background Rejections)
Once a kitchen or a capacity is overloaded,
size doesn’t matter.
Everything slows down, fails, or shuts off.
This is exactly the problem organizations
face today.
The Problem: Cost Up, Outages Up, User Experience Down
Organizations face three recurring capacity problems:
Unpredictable Workload Peaks
Demand > Capacity
Outages & Failures
Delays – Rejections – Broken Refreshes
Costs increasing
Oversizing without Insight
Uncontrolled Capacity Demand
Rising Costs with Little Insight
Poor User Experience & Lost Trust
• Spikes and unpredictable
workloads push capacities
beyond limits.
• Teams oversize SKUs "just to be
safe".
• Slow dashboards (~20 second
delays).
• Money spent on large
capacities without clear insight.
• Failed interactions & errors.
• Consumption debt builds up
faster than it can be repaid.
• Leads to throttling and
outages.
• No link between spend, usage,
and value.
• Broken refreshed (minutes to
hours of disruption).
Unmanaged fabric capacities create a costly cycle of over-spend, outages, and frustrates users.
Capacity Planning is HARD!
Capacity Planning Today: Hard, Slow, and Inaccurate
How teams try to manage capacity with current tools:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Measure real workloads using a trial capacity
Analyze CU consumption in the Metrics App (30-second blocks)
Map Consumption to SKU CU budgets
Size to peak interactive load (frontend)
Adjust for background load (backend)
Validate and iterate until delays disappear
Manual Workload Measurement
Slow, Iterative Adjustments
No Prediction or Future Insight
Logs are great for I looking at the past – but they can’t predict the future.
Modern BI Teams in 2026
Deserve Modern Solutions
Wiiisdom: Putting Fabric Capacity Under Control
Proactively manage, predict, and optimize your Fabric Capacity
Predictive Capacity Forecasting
Intelligent Cost Optimization
Frontend & Backend Visibility
✓ Forecast future CU demand
✓ Right-Size SKUs
✓ See interactive vs. Background load
✓ Model "what-if" scenarios
✓ Eliminate oversizing
✓ Analyze throttling impacts
✓ Avoid surprises
✓ Optimize spend
Automatic Health & Outage Prevention
Real-Workload Simulation
Continuous Monitoring & Governance
✓ Detect risks early
✓ Test peak loads
✓ Test peak loads
✓ Receive proactive alerts
✓ Validate SKU capacity
✓ Validate SKU capacity
✓ Stay in the zero-outage zone
✓ Identify bottlenecks
✓ Identify bottlenecks
From firefighting to predictable, optimized performance.
DEMO
What You Get with Wiiisdom
Predictable performance, lower costs, and complete control of your Fabric capacities.
Zero Outages, Predictable Performance
Forecasting Instead of Firefighting
Lower Costs with Smart Right-Sizing
✓ Prevent throttling
✓ See issues before they happen
✓ Avoid expensive over-sizing
✓ Avoid delays, and failures
✓ Make decisions based on future
✓ Only pay for the capacity you
✓ Protect user experience
demand, not past logs
actually need
Visibility Across All Workloads
Scale BI with No Surprises
More Time for High-Value Work
✓ Understand interactive vs
✓ Business grows → capacity stays
✓ Reduce manual analysis
background load
✓ Know what is creating pressure
under control
✓ Predictable, stable for all teams
✓ Stop trial-and-error “fix”
✓ Focus on delivering BI value
Come to the booth #433
and meet the
Wiiisdom team
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