What is using all of my Microsoft Fabric Capacity? A quick guide to installing and using the Fabric Capacity Metrics App

Introduction

Are you experiencing throttling or perhaps even outages in your Microsoft Fabric Capacity? Are you confused why your Capacity is maxed out, or perhaps wish to explore your usage deeper?

Then you have come to the right place.

This brief article will show you how to install the Fabric Capacity Metrics App, and give you some quick pointers for navigating it and understanding the insights it provides.

Installing the Fabric Capacity Metrics App

To install the Capacity Metrics App, you need to follow a few steps:

Install the App by going to app.powerbi.com, find the Admin Portal and the Capacity Settings, and click “See usage report”:

From the App page, select ‘Get It Now’:

After installing, open the report and click ‘Connect’:

Find the Capacity ID in your Capacity Settings, and input it in the Connection menu:

Finally, add data source credentials to the installed app’s data model, and let the report refresh:

Using the Capacity Metrics App

With the app installed, its time to have a look at the insights it might assist you with. The App is split into multiple pages. From the main navigation, You’ll have access to the Compute and Storage pages, but I find that some of the most impactful insights are the ones hidden in the drill through pages. Read on below for a small tour.

Compute Page

The Overview page provides an overwhelming amount of information. The way I use the page is as follows:

Am I leveraging the full extent of my Capacity, and what types of processes are driving the usage?

The top right ‘CU over time’ chart in this case shows that I am only using about 1% of my Trial F64 SKU. I even had to switch the diagram to Logarithmic Y-Axis scaling to see anything in the visualisation.

The chart also clues me in on whether my usage has been driven by interactive or background processes. In my case, mostly background (no wonder, seeing as this is my developer account tenant, used for testing purposes).
Had my usage been higher, the Throttling and Overages views would have shown more significant insights, allowing me to see Delays, Rejections and Overages. In my case, there are only very limited delays:

Which artifact types and specific items are spending most of my Capacity?

The Ribbon chart allows for a quick overview of the most demanding artifact types are eating my capacity. I find that I only really use the CU option here, as that is also the billing metric. In my case, I clearly have something going on with some expensive Warehouse artifacts:

Don’t forget to click a data point to filter the other visuals. In my case, it is the DataflowsStagingWarehouse, as shown in the filtered Items table:

For more details on the Compute page, have a look at the official documentation: Understand the metrics app compute page — Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Timepoint Details Page

To me, the hidden gem of the Fabric Capacity Metrics App is the Timepoint Details page, which many people don’t event realize exists.

To find it, right click or select a specific time point in the Top Right visualisation, and drill through to the Timepoint Details Page:

Which specific actions are driving my usage?

On the TimePoint Details page I can see that there are both Interactive and Background operations going on during the selected 30 second Timepoint. Many of which are indeed related to the Warehouse identified before.

Notice how the Interactive Operations show timepoints that start right around the selected Timepoint? This is because interactive operations are smoothed over a 5 minute time interval, in terms of how the usage affects your capacity.
Notice how the Background Operations display activities which are not taking place in the selected TimePoint? This is because background operations are smoothed over 24 hours!
Nonetheless, I can see that at the selected point in time, my capacity was used interactively for some write-back to the Warehouse using the XMLA endpoint (more about live data write-back in this blogpost: Link to blog about Write-Back to Fabric), as well as some background acitivities which due to smoothing was also consuming CUs at this time.

Are there any specific Users or Operations which stand out?

Another thing I like to do, is to examine whether any specific Users or actions stand out in the report. In this case, I can see that it is myself, using the jonAdmin account, which is driving most of the usage.
Especially if you are diving into an overage scenario, it is most helpful to know if specific users are misusing Fabric Items, in order for you to help them finding a better solution.

As another example, in a different tenant, I was curious about how expensive it was to perform Copilot queries, and I could observe the following in the Timepoint Details page:

In which I can see that Copilot Queries are most definitely not “free” to execute in terms of Capacity Units. If you are curious specifically about CU consumption of Copilot queries, have a look at Chris Webb’s blog: How much does Copilot cost in Microsoft Fabric? (crossjoin.co.uk)

For more information about the Timepoints Detail page, here is a link to the official documentation: Understand the metrics app timepoint page — Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

OneLake Storage page

Finally, we have the OneLake Storage page:

In Microsoft Fabric, we have to pay for storage, in addition to our Capacity, hence another relevant question for any Fabric Administrator might be:

How much billable storage are we using, are what are the primary contributers?

Luckily, this page is easy to interpret. My Demo workspace by far takes 1st place in billable storage, and by clicking it I get a filtered view of the Workspace specific Total Storage and Billable Storage.

Clicking the Export Data button in the top right, further lets you download this storage data if you wish:

More details about the storage page can be found on this documentation page: Understand the metrics app storage page — Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Summary

The Capacity Metrics App is an excellent tool for understanding your Capacity Usage and Storage, as well as pinpointing exact operations which might be the cause of overages.

Use the app to monitor your whole capacity and/or specific workspaces, and to understand if the users of your tenant are leveraging their Fabric Capabilities correctly.

I hope you learned a thing or two from the sample Questions and Approaches to answering them. What are you using the Metrics App for? Please let me know if you have other cool use cases!