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The Power BI Premium video you need to watch… probably (Oct 2021) - read the full article about it consulting 2021, IT Consulting and from Guy in a Cube on Qualified.One
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And in this video, were going to look at what is new with Power BI Premium.
Lets do this.
(upbeat music) If you finding us for the first time, be sure to hit that subscribe button, to stay up to date with all the videos from both Patrick and myself, And before we get into this, make note that Im recording this as of Sunday, October 24th, 2021, is going to become important later on when I talk about some dates.
Be mindful that there could be updates past this video.
And you know, you may want to validate.
Power BI Premium Gen2 is now officially generally available.
So that means you can move over to Gen2.
Yay.
Its no longer in preview.
Gen2 is a rearchitecture of Power BI Premium so there are a bunch of things that come with that.
The biggest thing now is your focus is going to be on CPU, as opposed to CPU and memory.
From a memory perspective, things have shifted from a per capacity memory allocation to a per dataset allocation.
So that means that each data set will have that memory limitation.
So if youre on a P1, your memory is limited to 25 gigs.
Thats 25 gig per data set, thats not for the whole capacity as a whole.
So the thing that you need to worry about for the entire capacity is CPU.
Another big thing that came with Gen2, as opposed to Gen1, is the concurrency of refreshes.
So it used to be that you had max concurrent refreshes for capacity.
So a P1 was six concurrent refreshes.
Thats no longer the case.
So the refreshes themselves, the CPU associated with the refresh, is spread out over a 24 hour period.
So, you know, go wild.
Now that doesnt mean to say that you dont need to care about refreshes.
You do, but they are spread out over that 24 hour period.
So as you monitor capacity usage, just be mindful of that.
With Power BI Premium Gen2, one thing that comes about is autoscale.
So this is a new capability with Power BI Premium that allows you some protections for overages.
So if youre going above what your CPU limits are for that given capacity SKU, autoscale is available for you.
And autoscale goes on a per core basis.
There are some ways that you can limit that.
So you can put the limitation of what you want to cap the cores too.
And then also from an Azure subscription, because you have to tie this to an Azure subscription, you can put a cost limit on there.
So theres two protections that you have.
If you turn it on, its not on by default.
The big thing I want to get across with autoscale for Power BI Premium is this should not be considered when youre thinking about capacity planning.
So if youre planning what SKU that you want for Power BI Premium, do not include autoscale.
Please, I beg you.
Autoscale is great for those spikes that youre just not thinking about.
So maybe its like an end of quarter or end of year spike, where it lasts maybe a day or two, and you dont want to commit to the cost of that higher SKU for a long period of time.
Autoscale can be beneficial in that standpoint.
But know there is going to be a cost there and it may not necessarily be predictable.
But if you are always in that autoscaler overload range, you need to rethink about what scale youre at with your capacity.
So its probably an indication you need to go up to a higher SKU because you just have consistently higher load and the current SKUs just not able to handle that.
And or what I always recommend, look at your datasets, look at your reports, and see if you can maybe make them perform a little better so that youre not going above into that overload area.
All right, so thats what Power BI Premium Gen2 is all about.
Lets talk about some dates.
Power BI Premium Gen2 is now generally available.
There are some dates that you need to be aware of that are coming up.
First of which is November 4th.
So November 4th, 2021 is when charges for autoscale will begin.
And so if youre going over and youve enabled autoscale, you will start incurring charges to your Azure subscription.
Take a look in the premium capacity metrics app and see if you are already having some overloads.
Well look at that in a second.
Just know that there are some costs that are going to come into effect.
Every core that you get from an autoscale perspective is for a 24 hour period.
November 15th, 2021 is the day admins will start getting email notifications to migrate to Gen2.
So if youre still on a Gen1 capacity, youll start getting notifications to start migrating over to Gen2.
The big date that was listed in the documentation, and Ill have links to the documentation down in the description below.
So definitely go check that out.
That could be updated past the recording of this video.
So always go look to that for the latest news.
January 15th, 2021, that is the day that Microsoft right now is targeted to shift all Gen1 capacity over to Gen2.
So this is the forced migration date.
If you havent already migrated over to Gen2 by January 15th, that will be the day that your capacity will be Gen2.
Please, please, please be aware of that right after the holiday season, after the new year, is the plan date for the force migration.
Try to do some planning and testing before that date to make sure everythings going to work as expected.
And the last thing I want to talk about is how do you monitor your capacity? There is a premium capacity metrics app that was released for Gen2.
Some folks I know are not necessarily used to it.
So I just want to touch on a quick thing to know.
The big item of, are you going over and will it kick in for auto-scale, if you have that enabled.
So enough of all this talking, lets head over to my machine and take a look.
All right, so Ive got the capacity metrics app installed.
These are items that are running in the capacity.
The big thing I want to call your eye to is the upper right-hand corner, this overload minutes per hour.
This is where you get your indication of, did we overload? If you see items or bars in this chart, then you are either getting throttled or have the potential of being throttled, and or if youve enabled autoscale, you will be going into autoscale and getting cores associated with that.
That is your telltale sign that you need to go do something.
I will be doing a video later on just walking through how to look at the capacity metrics app, how to read it, how to interpret it.
The Power BI product team is continually working on updates.
So I want to wait a little bit.
But the big thing for right now is autoscale is only for emergencies, dont do that for capacity planning.
Just ignore it altogether.
I want to hand this over to you.
Do you have any questions about Power BI Premium Gen2? Let me know down in the comments below. I want to hear it.
If you like this video, be sure to hit that big thumbs up button, smash it, if you so desire.
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And as always from both Patrick and myself, thank you so much for watching.
Keep being awesome. And well see you in the next video.
Guy in a Cube: The Power BI Premium video you need to watch… probably (Oct 2021) - IT Consulting