Power BI Premium traffic issues

[amallen125]

My company switched to Power BI premium last month.  We had traffic issues, which I wasn't expecting.  We've got a few hundred users, that have worked okay using Pro.  In our first month of using premium, we had users that had nothing but loading screens for a whole day, which others in the same office, were fine.

I've got a ticket open with the PBI team.  in the interim, I wanted to see if others had the same issue, and if anyone has advice for me.

Thanks in advance.

[GilbertQ]

Hi there,

It would depends if you moved all users to Premium App Workspaces?
And then it would also depend on the size of your Premium that you got.

This is because even though you have got Power BI Premium, it still has got a capacity limit. And if all the users are on Premium Capacity and the data models are large, it will over consume your capacity. Which is what appears to be happening.

Does that make sense?

[amallen125]

Hi GilbertQ,

Yeah, that makes sense.  We did move the users to the premium app.  that's where we had the issue.  We ended up starting with P1, because we couldn't get a gauge for what was needed. 

What's interesting to me is that during the peak times two users, side by side, (a) one had no issues, (b) the other got nothing but a load screens.  I guess it could depends on how concurrency is handled.  I really don't understand the disparity, or the logic used to effectively exclude some people from the dashboards. 

We did look at the metrics available, and they showed some high peaks, but nothing crazy or prolonged.  

I'm okay pushing for upgraded capacity, if that's really the issue.  I don't feel confident in any explanation of what happened during our peak, to make that decision though. 

Anyone know of a way to monitor traffic real time?

[GilbertQ]

Hi @amallen125

Have a look at these details in the Microsoft Documentation, and see if that gives you a clearer picture

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-admin-premium-manage#usage-measurements-power-bi-p...

[amallen125]

Hi GilbertQ,

We reviewed the usage graphs as well.  We saw it go beyond 80% a few times, but still it really surprises me that users would experience no service at all, with usage that went above 80% a few times. 

I'm still not seeing how my company can effectively manage traffic in PBI.  It still seems like a project not a product.  It's very unfortunate because we've spent a lot of time building things out in PBI.  I've had a ticket open for over a week now, and no one can give me any idicational of why several users were effectively booted from the system.  It's frustrating.  From what I can see, traffic alone doesn't explain it, so I'm not motivated to increase our subscription blindly, yet MS can't give me the root cause.  I don't know where to go from here.  

[GilbertQ]

Hi there,

Could I suggest you open the PBIX on a local server or PC.
Then see how memory it is consuming?
Also do a refresh and see how CPU intensive that is, as well as how much memory it uses. When completing a data refresh it will require double the amount of memory of the data model. So by knowing the above it will give an indication if your Premium node is running out of memory which would cause users to get booted out. As well with CPU resources.

Also if there is more than one data model in your Premium I would do the same above to see the overall size. There are new usage metrics in the Power BI service which can show you the usage over the past 7 days. So have a look at that