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capacity

Capacity checklist before you resize Fabric or Premium

Resize after measuring — not after one slow Monday. Checklist the SKU drivers first.

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SQL Server to Power BI performance dashboard with query latency and model refresh
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April 27, 20241 min readBy Power BI Analytics Team

Capacity pain shows as throttling, slow interactive queries, or refreshes stuck Queued. Collect evidence before changing SKU; publish Fabric capacity recommendations only after commercial sizing is confirmed.

Measure first

  • Fabric Capacity Metrics / Premium metrics: CU spikes correlated to refresh vs interactive windows.
  • Largest Import dataset sizes and concurrent scheduled refreshes overlapping the spike.
  • DirectQuery datasets’ daytime query volume (Performance Analyzer + warehouse DMVs).

Checklist before resize

Eliminate personal-gateway contention and non-folding mashup. Stagger schedules. Move heavy transforms to dataflows/pipelines. Only then consider higher SKU or Autoscale. Document Max memory / rejection behavior your admins expect when CU saturates so support does not treat throttling as a random outage.

Re-test a representative board report and a worst-case refresh after any SKU change; keep before/after screenshots in the change ticket.

Related services

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capacity

Illustrative KPI view

Sample model

Revenue

$2.2M

+10.8% vs LY

Gross margin

23.4%

+2.3 pts

Decision cycle time

9.6 days

-0.2 days

Open exceptions

11

-6 vs last week

Trailing 12 periodsvs plan
On track
61%
Watch
17%
Critical
11%

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