If you are evaluating Microsoft Fabric and do not currently own a Premium Capacity, chances are you’re using Microsoft Fabric Trial Capacities. All Power BI users within an organisation or specific security groups given the rights can opt into Fabric Trial Capacities. Therefore, you may already have several Trial Fabric Capacities in your tenant. Your Fabric Administrators can specifically control who can opt into the Fabric Trial capacities within the Fabric Admin Portal, on the Help and support settings section, and enabling the Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features setting as shown in the following image:
Enable Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features for specific security groups via Fabric Admin Portal
The authorised users can then opt into Fabric Trial by following this process:
Click the Account Manager on the top right corner of the page
Click the Start trial button
Click the Start trial button again
Provide the required details
Click the Extend my free trial button
The following image shows the preceding steps:
Start Fabric Free Trial
As you see, opting into Fabric Trial is simple, unless it isn’t!
There are cases where authorised users cannot start their Fabric Trial because their tenant has already exceeded the limit of available trial capacities. In that case, the users get the following message:
In Nov 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric’s general availability and Public Preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. In a previous post, I explained what Copilot means to Power BI developers, which is valid for other Fabric developers such as data engineers and data scientists as Copilot for Fabric helps with those experiences as well. But the main focus of this blog post is to discuss the requirements, how to enable Copilot, and how to use it from a Power BI development point of view. So, this blog will not discuss other aspects of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. With that, let’s begin.
Requirements
Right off the bat, Copilot is only available on Power BI Premium capacities or their equivalentFabric capacities. So, NO it is NOT available on Power BI Pro or Premium Per User or Power BI Embedded Analytics. So the Power BI items you want to use Copilot on must be in a Workspace assigned to a Power BI Premium P1 or Microsoft Fabric F64 capacities or higher.
You also need to have a Contributor role on the premium workspace.
To use Copilot, your Microsoft Fabric Administrator must enable it from the Fabric Admin Portal. This setting is not available in all regions yet, but Microsoft is gradually rolling it out to more regions.
As mentioned before, your Fabric Administrator must enable Copilot features within the Admin Portal. Follow these steps to enable Copilot on your tenant after logging into Microsoft Fabric:
Click Settings (the gear icon on the top right of the page)
Click Admin portal
Ensure that the Tenant setting tab is selected
Scroll all the way down to the Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service (preview) section
Note
You can also use the search box and search for OpenAI to find the Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service (preview) section.
Enable the Users can use a preview of Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI
Click the Apply button
Enable the Data sent to Azure OpenAI can be processed outside your tenant’s geographic region, compliance boundary, or national cloud instance
Click the Apply button again
That is it. You enabled the Copilot capabilities on your tenant.
In the previous blog post, I explained Microsoft Fabric capacities, shedding light on diverse capacity options and how they influence data projects. We delved into Capacity Units (CUs), pricing nuances, and practical cost control methods, including manually scaling and pausing Fabric capacity. Now, we’re taking the next step in our Microsoft Fabric journey by exploring the possibility of automating the pause and resume process. In this blog post, we’ll unlock the secrets to seamlessly managing your Fabric Capacity with automation that helps us save time and resources while optimising the usage of data and analytics workloads.
Right off the bat, this is a rather long blog, so I added a bonus section at the end for those who are reading from the beginning to the end. With that, let’s dive in!
The Problem
As we have learned in the previous blog post, one way to manage our Fabric capacity costs is to pause the capacity while not in use and resume it again when needed. While this can help with cost management, as it is a manual process, it is prone to human error, which makes it impractical in the long run.
The Solution
A more practical solution is to automate a daily process to pause and resume our Fabric capacity automatically. This can be done by running Azure Management APIs. Depending on our expertise, there are several ways to achieve the goal, such as running APIs on running the APIs via PowerShell (scheduling the runs separately), running the APIs via CloudShell, creating a flow in Power Automate, or creating the workflow in Azure Logic Apps. I prefer the latter, so this blog post explains the method.
I also explain the same scenario on my YouTube channel. Here is the video:
Automating Pause and Resume Fabric Capacity with Azure Logic Apps
Here is the scenario: we are going to create an Azure Logic Apps workflow that automatically does the following:
Check the time of the day
If it is between 8 am to 4 pm:
Check the status of the Fabric capacity
If the capacity is paused, then resume it, otherwise do nothing
If it is after 4 pm and before 8 am:
Check the status of the Fabric capacity
If the capacity is resumed, then pause it, otherwise do nothing
Follow these steps to implement the scenario in Azure Logic Apps:
Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS platform that allows users to get, create, share, and visualise data using a wide set of tools. It provides a unified solution for all our data and analytics workloads, from data ingestion and transformation to data engineering, data science, data warehouse, real-time analytics, and data visualisation. In a previous blog post, I explained the basics of the Microsoft Fabric data platform. In a separate blog post, I explained some Microsoft Fabric terminologies and personas where I explained what Tenant and Capacities are.
In this blog post, we will explore the different types of Fabric capacities, how they affect the performance and cost of our Fabric projects, and how you can control the capacity costs by pausing the capacity in Azure when it is not in use.
Fabric capacity types
Fabric capacities are the compute resources that power all the experiences in Fabric. They are available in different sizes and prices, depending on our needs and budget. We can currently obtain Fabric capacities in one of the following options:
If we want to purchase Microsoft Fabric capacities on Azure, they come in SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) sized from F2 – F2048, representing 2 – 2048 CU (Capacity Units). A CU is a unit of measure representing the resource power available for a Fabric capacity. The higher the CU, the more resources we get on our Fabric projects. For example, an F8 capacity has 8 CUs, which means it is four times more powerful than an F2 capacity, which has 2 CUs.
When purchasing Azure SKUs with a pay-as-you-go subscription, we are billed for compute power (which is the size of the capacity we choose) and for OneLake storage, which is charged for the data stored in OneLake per gigabyte per month (approximately $0.043 (New Zealand Dollar) per GB). OneLake is the unified storage layer for all the Fabric workloads. It allows users to store and access our data in a secure, scalable and cost-effective way.
Azure Fabric capacities are priced uniquely across regions. The pay-as-you-go pricing for a Fabric capacity at Australia East region is $0.3605 (NZD) per CU per hour, which translates to a monthly price of $526.217 (NZD) for an F2 ($0.3605 * 2 * 730 hours).
Now that we have an indication of the costs of owning Microsoft Fabric capacities let’s explore the methods to control the cost.
Nuances of Fabric’s Cost of Ownership
It is important to note that all the math we have gone through in the previous section is just about the capacity itself. But are there any other costs that may apply? The answer is it depends. If we obtain any SKUs lower than F64, we must buy Power BI Pro licenses per user on top of the capacity costs. For the tiers above F64, we get unlimited free users but, BUT, we still have to purchase Power BI Pro licenses for all developers on top of the cost of the capacity itself.
Another gotcha is that the Fabric experiences are unavailable to either Power BI Premium (PPU) users or the Power BI Embedded capacities. Just be mindful of that.
The good news for organisations owning Power BI Premium capacities is that you do not need to do anything to leverage Fabric capabilities. As a matter of fact, you already own a Fabric capacity, you just need to enable it on your tenant.
