How to management Power BI scheduled refresh in a smart way?

[Ding]

Hi Talents,

We are experiencing frequently failed with schedule refresh in Power BI service. 

I did research the reason might be:

1. gateway distance or network issue

2. insufficient memory - we upgrade from P1 to P2, should be enough memory

3. Exceed supported concurrent refresh for premium capacity

4. Model size or complex query

After review all possible issue, we upgraded to P2 and reschedule some of the report to avoid concurrent refresh, it seems like working better for few days, but later on it failed again.

Is there any way we can identify what is number for the supported concurrent refresh? How many refresh at same time, the shedule time of all the report in whole organization? Then we can have the traffic light to arrange the refresh in different time accordingly.

In additon, the hourly refresh seems stop working recently, please advise

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

It's all spelled out here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/embedded-capacity

what you are looking for is the number of concurrent renderers. For a P2 you get 12 .  

What you want to focus on is the refreshes that take the longest time, hogging renderers.  Use the Platform Health template app to collect your statistics, and then work with the individual developers to get them to reduce their query duration.

Also make sure to beef up your gateways.  Underpowered gateways contribute to longer query durations.

[Ding]

Thanks Lbendlin, good idea. 

In addition, the refresh summary is helpful to manage the schedule refresh as well

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-refresh-summary-for-premium-capacity-admins/

[lbendlin]

Yeah, we tried using that but it is a bit childish. Might work for scenarios where you have a handful of requests per day.  Our SKUs are close to (and sometimes over) capacity and we need to load balance them much more rigorously. 

Average refresh time is meaningless by itself, as is the number of refreshes. "Total time occupying a renderer" - that's what counts.