Power BI Performance: Premium M1 vs Shared

[christoffeldg]

Hi all,

We are interested in the Premium offering. But are wondering if the M1 offering has similar performance over Shared for a single report. We are interested in it from a user cost perspective, if performance is not significantly degraded.

Regards,

C

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@christoffeldg I think you mean "P1", this over simplifies what is offered with going the premium route but here are some thoughts. The report should work the same, the only challenge is with P1 is that you are purchasing the dedicated capacity and will be bound by that. The Pro license just puts you in a shared environment so there could be outside influences already. Either way, it largely depends on how much load your putting on the environment. Premium is a great solution for really large orgs, but I wouldn't assume that a P1 will just work depending on how large the user pool is and the activity, you may need a P2, or P3... 

[christoffeldg]

Hi Seth,

Many thanks for your response. But I actually meant the lowest capacity available, EM1. 

It's interesting to start with a low capacity so we can upscale when we see usage grow. However, we want to make sure the users have at least the same core experience as the shared environment. It is fine to dedicate the capacity of the EM1 to a single report.

In other words, if the EM1 uses 1 core back/front end for one report. How many cores back/front end is being utilized when the report is in the shared environment?

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@christoffeldg Ah. E sku. Sorry for the confusion. I would actually recommend looking at the A1 sku, which is the azure consumption based model for embedded rather than via Office 365. But in both cases, the only way the end user can consume reports is via the application in which you show it to them, not the Power BI Service. The Premium sku would allow you to share reports or apps via the Service or Embedded.

[christoffeldg]

@Seth_C_Bauer

I'm afraid that's not going to work. This is an enterprise environment with a very large diverse population of candidate(!) users. The idea is to deploy Power BI as a self-service tool (Not development!) where a group of users would use Premium the moment they cross the break-even treshold between Pro licenses and Premium (about 60 users).

However, this would only work if the Premium tiers provide comparable performance with Shared. If 60 users have worse performance on EM1 than they have on Shared then this option is not interesting. (Scaling linearly, ie 60 users -> EM1, 120 users -> EM2, 240 users -> EM3, 480 users -> P1, etc). Also, to make the comparison fair between Shared and Premium, there's the added parameter of using a single report for either. I understand many several concurrent reports would be more scalable in the shared environment due to a more dynamic capacity.

Ideally, it would be great if I knew how many vcores are assigned to reports in the shared environment.

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@christoffeldg

Lets break this down, more for my benefit because I'm not following all the way.

License clarifications:

By "Shared" you mean "Pro" licensing I assume. 

EM and A Skus are for embedding reports only

Premium covers embedding and end user consumption

Having a Pro license is a prerequisite for anyone who needs to build and share reports.

EM, A, Premium can all be considered add on's that support sharing to "free" end users. Those end users will not be able to share their own reports with others without a Pro license.

Having said all that, it sounds like this is a question about load/consumption that may cause performance issues. There is no direct comparison out there that I am aware of, but the Premium white paper does a good job of talking about the specifics of what is implemented behind the scenes. That can be found on the main articel about premium - https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi-premium/ where I'm sure you also have seen the cost calculator that uses rough counts for determining level of premium you would need.

I am un-aware of any documentation that outlines the type of machine or thresholds for the normal Pro license where many users share a common space, so there isn't a way to correlate or test this environment setup next to a premium one.

[christoffeldg]

Hi Seth,

Thanks for your response.

As you said the Premium offering is well described in the whitepapers (We went through them), but what is not well described are the shared resources. 

But I understand from your post that there are no documentation to be found that describe the shared resources to give us an idea of relative performance.

Many thanks,

Christoffel