How to forecast usage from Premium Capacity to Fabric Capacity

[daniele_tiles]

Hi to all,

we've plenty of clients who are using Power BI with Premium Capacity.

I've read that starting on 01/01/2025 Premium Capacity won't be available anymore, and so clients should opt for Fabric Capacity.

I was wondering: is there a way, based on the current usage of the BI Reports (le't not talk about the new feature of Fabric) to forecast what the usage\consume\cost might be when switching to Fabric Capacity? At the moment we have no Pipelines, Lakehouse or Fabric Warehouses, I'd like to understand for a plain Power BI situation.

Best regards

Daniele Tiles

[Greg_Deckler]

@daniele_tiles So, if you still need free users to view reports, then you will at least need an F64 license which is equivalent to a P1. Each move up in an F SKU from F64 is equivalent to the next P SKU. So F128 => P2, etc. To get any reasonable price on it, you will need to go for a reserved instance. This means that the compute, at least in the US, is effectively the same price as as a P1 SKU ($5K/month MSRP). But, you will have to pay extra for storage. Use the Azure pricing calculator but if you are using all 100 TB of your use rights in Premium (per capacity) then that will cost you another $2K/month. And, if you are currently using your PBIRS usage rights from Premium, you lose that and that will cost you another, I mean, what, $13K - $70K depending? Because you will need SQL Enterprise with SA. I have videos on this:

[daniele_tiles]

Hi @Greg_Deckler ,

thanks for the answer, but I actually I wanted to understand a bit more.

Fabric license is a pay-as-you-go: the more you use it, the more you pay...and the less you use it, the less you pay.

Like with any Azure product, you have a cost based on consume, and you know how much querying costs and so on.

With the informations we have on the license pages, we can get the "upper bound" of our monthly cost if we get a normal license or if we do a reservation (I guess it's like Synapse, you sign for X years the Fabric License). But we've no idea if our usage would be even less of the monthly reservation cost (considering only report usage, clearly).

That would be useful in order to understand, and also to help clients (otherwise you need to tell them to go with the reservation, and you don't get any advantage of the Fabric license, IMHO).

[Greg_Deckler]

@daniele_tiles OK, so I may be mistaken but I think you may have some degree of misunderstanding here. If you need Premium for free users, you have to go with an F64. That's table stakes. Now, you get charged for the compute per hour let's say. So, for every hour it is running, your pay-as-you-go F64 is going to cost you $11.52 regardless if you use it or not or how much you use it. Doesn't matter. So your usage is to some degree meaningless. If it runs for that hour, you get charged for that hour. It doesn't vary based on whether you actually use it or not. So if it runs for 730 hours in a month then it will cost you $8,409.60. Now, if you only need it to be on for an 8 hour work day and not on weekends and we assume an average of 21 working days in a month, then you're only talking about $1,935.36/month. But, this is based upon when you make the capacity available to be used, not how much you are using it. 

[daniele_tiles]

Hi @Greg_Deckler ,

what you are writing is very interesting, I guess you've opened my eyes. Have you got any link to Microsoft official documentation that details this?

Have you any idea why in the Fabric Capacity Metrics App the operations are divided in billable and not billable? I thought that it was because the more you use, the more you pay (because today with Premium Capacity it's not like this). And since this wasn't available before in Premium Capacity Metrics App (at least, I don't remember) I thought it was connected to the more you use, the more you pay.
Thank you so much

Daniele

[Greg_Deckler]

@daniele_tiles I think this page says exactly what I am saying: Microsoft Fabric - Pricing | Microsoft Azure