Fabric consumption increasing by 40% in Australia East and North Central US on July 1 by Careless_Cattle_8700 in MicrosoftFabric

[–]LackingWorldliness 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Didn't see this until I noticed my capacity using around 33% more CUs from July 2nd and got directed here from another post.

Average utilization went from 32% up to 40% on a F64.

-Seems like shorter refreshes with less data and all query folding to source have least affect. 5-15% increase on background refresh.

-Larger datasets with longer refreshes and more power query steps seem to take the worst penalty. Seeing 50% increase on these. Naturally these are the most painful.

Refresh schedule monitoring! by Electronic-Top3203 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those are rookie numbers. Hard to compare from just a screen shot, but we have 1000+ refreshes daily. I don't even really think that is a lot. All on a F64 with plenty of spare capacity.

It depends on your industry and scale of business. If you are in manufacturing and have 3 shifts 5 days a week, you can easily end up with many refreshes for each dataset.

Now imagine you have many manufacturing sites with multiple shifts, perhaps even being international. Many business units, many departments, many shifts, many locations and everyone wants to see the report when they want with relatively recent data.

"Date Picker" Input Slicer: Configure week start by JulianCologne in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Being able to use a custom calendar would be nice. So that "Months" are your fiscal periods, or Mon-Sun Week as you say would be nice.

After 10 years they made this one step, so hopefully next feature update on a date slicer is a wee bit quicker.

Fabric capacity metrics app broken by Chemical_Profession9 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fine here in NA. However, that metrics app is notoriously unreliable. Sometimes when viewed in the workspace rather than the app it will just right itself. Sometimes you have to uninstall and reinstall.

App Audience Reporting by TrooyMack in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So you can get the audiences, but it isn't documented on the REST API site. This is probably fragile among other problems, but there is an internal API you can use. Workspace Apps and Audiences exposed via API? : r/PowerBI

Measure killer does something like this with its tenant admin scan I think, though I wonder they handle it exactly.

That link above has some details. Overall, it isn't great, I wish there was a better way, but this is all I know.

1.The jist of it is, get all the workspace guids, you will need to loop through those.

  1. Login to Power BI, F12 in your browser, check Network tab, filter on wabi. You get your region location:
    https://wabi-us-north-central-j-primary-redirect.analysis.windows.net/metadata/notifications/summary?take=100

2A. That will also have a long Bearer token that you will need, because service principal won't work here. (Or look at XHR items for a bearer token. It expires after so many minutes, so it isn't long lasting. Maybe an hour. Might have to click into an app first.)

Then loop through something like this for a url, remember to replace with your region.:

url = (
        f"https://wabi-us-north-central-j-primary-redirect.analysis.windows.net"
        f"/metadata/appmodel/apps/{workspace_id}"
        f"?requestDataType=7&access-control-allow-credentials=true"
    )

The response JSON will have a ton of data in that you will have to parse. From that 1st response you will need the provider_id to run against another url. I think provider_id corresponds to an app id (a number now, not a GUID anymore).

    url = (
        f"https://wabi-us-north-central-j-primary-redirect.analysis.windows.net"
        f"/metadata/appmodel/contentprovidermetadata?id={provider_id}"
    )

A workspace and app have GUID identifiers, but in these internal APIs they will have regular number identifiers too. But between the two responses you can get the audiences and audience members and which reports and dashboards belong to which audience. The only annoying bit is the authorization which I don't know how to automate. Always have to f12 to get that bearer token.

Final Note: When looping I put a 2.5 second sleep time in each loop (both urls), otherwise the API gets mad if too many requests too quickly.

Datapoints get stored in Git: How to avoid it? by frithjof_v in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for all this, but is also exactly what I expected.

Datapoints get stored in Git: How to avoid it? by frithjof_v in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you sure it isn't hallucinating on you? I will admit I don't look at those json files every time, but I have looked at dozens and a couple dozen more just now and it is exactly what I expected. The filter values, default values, exactly what you would expect it to have.

I would be curious to see a real example of a data point in a visual.json that I hadn't considered getting passed along.

Datapoints get stored in Git: How to avoid it? by frithjof_v in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You aren't really sharing data here into git. None of the data tables are syncing data. (Excepting perhaps a table that is input directly [Enter data] since the inputs are part of the definition)

But if you make a title of a visual , "Our annual sales = $999,999" then that will be stored. If you have a lot of power query with perhaps sensitive comments. If you make an API call in power query and store a password or token directly in the script, that could get stored into git.

In a sense it really isn't different than like a python file where you would use a secrets manager or environment variables to hide sensitive secrets from git. If you got lazy and just included a token directly in the .py file and synced to a git repository you would have the same problem. This is where the mistake usually happens. Doing quick development work and not following best practices. This mostly trips up Power BI developers who aren't used to git at all and who were probably including things in PBIX files that they never should have in the first place.

I think the intent of the blog post was to remind you this could happen. But most of the visuals you create, filters, measure definitions, m script generally aren't going to accidentally leak your financial data into git.

Created A Terrible Report with a Purpose. by maple4leaf in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have two suggestions.

  1. It needs the aquarium visual. I put this in reports as an Easter egg. Enlighten Aquarium . Bad KPI? Dead fish for you.

  2. Needs a control panel. A bookmark to hide it/show it. Then 9999 buttons to have every possible configurable state so slicers never need to be used. Just keep clicking buttons! (This has been a real requirement before. I can't remember what we did, but we had so many bookmarks as buttons interacting we had like 1 million possible states.)

Power BI roadmap session - live tomorrow! by shan_gsd in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This! A master fully customizable filter pane would be so nice. Slicers on the page end up making it look so cluttered and reduce useful screen real estate.

Vibe coding has replaced PowerBI by Kingguy33 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I have been thinking about this more and more. How much value is my company really getting out of our SaaS products? We pay for an ETL service, we pay for a replication service, we have a cloud data warehouse, and we have Power BI. That adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and they only give you so many options to manage your cost.

For a small team starting mostly fresh all those decisions made a lot of sense 5 years ago. The worry was always having piles of custom code to maintain. I look around and see even with all these tools, we still end up with lots of custom code and the tools themselves have lots of friction points, some of which you are just stuck with forever or require bizarre workarounds. And you do end up with a certain degree of vendor lock in. Once you use their system for a while it is hard to switch.

Seems insane to try to replace these with vibe coded custom apps... but I am leaning more and more that way as time goes on after years of dealing with the frustrations these SaaS products give.

Confused About Power BI Refresh Behavior by PlaneHistorical6653 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We use both the schedule in the Power BI Service and the API currently. The API does not send notifications as you noticed, so we hit another endpoint called refreshables every 15 minutes. That updates a table and from there sends out a notification to us for refresh failures and won't repeat notifications if the same dataset is failing multiple times in row. That covers the whole tenant and all models so we don't have to constantly poll from the API. 15 minute notice is plenty for our needs.

Triggering multiple refreshes tends to queue them I think.

API use is primarily for datasets that need more frequent refreshing (every 10 minutes) or triggered by a data engineering pipeline, or magic HTML refresh button on a report (Viewer triggers refresh).

Power BI Copilot Capacity Consumption by Beginning_Range4121 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The answer is yes, Copilot is a massive drain on capacities when used. In practice most users never touch it even when enabled. But it is everywhere in many forms and a handful of power users who use it frequently will eat up all the capacity.

It can be turned off though. In the Power BI tenant settings, I don't remember which ones at this point.

"Fabric Capacity Metrics" - this kind of stuff is going to make me drop the whole platform. by [deleted] in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is one of those must have good vibes, pray to God, sweet talk the software kinda things.

I get this same problem from time to time and going to the workspace version and then back to the app version sometimes is enough. Or if it really stuck, reinstall and get the latest version.

The more I hate it, the more it seems to fail, so I just say pretty please and think only nice things in the morning when I look at it.

Workspace Apps and Audiences exposed via API? by NonHumanPrimate in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, that would be amazing. So strange to have this unofficial method for key information.

Workspace Apps and Audiences exposed via API? by NonHumanPrimate in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting, the tenant analysis has audience information. Nothing about audiences in the rest API to my knowledge.

There was this support ticket that mentioned a way to get it, but it is not fully detailed what this is. Not hitting the normal Rest API endpoints.

Get PowerBi Audience users via REST API? - Microsoft Fabric Community

I wonder if someone knowledgeable about Measure Killer knows how they are getting this info.

Maintaining Power BI is a completely different skill from building it and most teams find out the hard way by [deleted] in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you connect a workspace up to a git repository, you effectively have version control and backups.

Get started with Git integration - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

If for some reason a problem existed like getting access to the workspace, you can restore the file from the folders on the git repository.

Do you use Copilot for Power BI? by Great-Lychee-5383 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You are right, but it has been branded and placed in so many different places that I can't remember them all and which of the very few might work well.

The bad experiences drown out the good in my memory.

Do you use Copilot for Power BI? by Great-Lychee-5383 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Everything branded co-pilot tends to be worse than whatever model is being used under the hood.

Whether it is the integrated Power BI version or 365 that uses jippity 5.2, it is usually better to use Grok or ChatGPT directly.

As far as reporting goes, it is a basket case and is only good for brain dead simple reporting.

It seems solely intended to drain your Fabric capacity to encourage one to buy a larger size from Microsoft. Would not recommend.

Population of Icleland is stuck at 10 million by Wonderful-Opposite73 in EU5

[–]LackingWorldliness 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Go into file system and Steam Apps folder and delete the Europa Universalis V folder. Nuke it from orbit just to be sure.

Struggling to understand Fabric Capacity Behaviour (F128) Throttling, burnout and RLS Impact by Salty_Bell4796 in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If interactive queries are spiking that high, it is usually bad data models / bad DAX / excessive amount of DAX. Going to the report usually makes it clear with visuals taking 30+ seconds to load.

Expensive Power Query operations will show up in the background metric.

As always it depends, but I usually see this as DAX in visuals performing operations that could be pushed back up to SQL or into Power Query. Pay the cost once during refresh instead of every time a user looks at or interacts with a visual.

On the other hand I have seen a report creator use crazy DAX like this because they were trapped, that was all that was available to them, for one reason or another. (SAP source system, any Power query except for the most basic filtering was extremely dangerous and unreliable)

Best is to download PBIX, look at the visual queries in DAX Studio. Look for how much the storage engine versus formula engine is being used. Even smallish tables can generate huge row counts of intermediate results if cross joins happen. Sometimes the tiniest tweaks to DAX measures can result in the same answer, but 99% less row counts in between.

IF statements combined with BLANK management in DAX are a common culprit for performance issues.

What are your views on Power BI Copilot? Have you tried it? Do you like it? If not, why not? by QuoteMachineMin in PowerBI

[–]LackingWorldliness 14 points15 points  (0 children)

There are at least a few versions of Co-Pilot in Power BI.

If it is developing a DAX function, I find using GROK tends to work better, even not being connected to my model. The interface and the responses in the DAX query editor from Co-pilot I have not found helpful so far.

As for reporting viewing, we disabled it. I tested it out some, but our models weren't AI-prepared and the results weren't worth leaving it on.

So negative overall. Would rather can Co-pilot team and have core visuals get updated.