Microsoft’s opportunity to migrate from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium opens up a world of new possibilities. Blue BI presents two apps that facilitate evaluating adoption through a cost assessment app and achieving monitoring standards comparable to the current Power BI Premium monitoring apps.
Given Microsoft’s recent opportunity to migrate Azure Analysis Services models to a Power BI Premium dataset, it has become necessary to investigate not only the migration process but also the implications it entails. To this end, two tools have been studied to address the migration: the Cost App and the Power BI Premium Monitoring App.
These tools help manage the implications of choosing to migrate your models. Firstly, migration requires a Power BI Premium license. Given the significant cost of such a license, a Cost App has been developed to assess various scenarios and identify the optimal combination of Power BI licenses.
Monitoring resources, a critical aspect of migration, is addressed by examining the transition from Azure Analysis Services monitoring logs to the Power BI Premium Monitoring App. Monitoring Premium capacities is essential for making informed decisions regarding costs and performance. The app allows viewing trends over the last 14-28 days, depending on the visual, showing information on performance, overload, autoscale management, and capacity refresh.
Cost App
As mentioned earlier, a necessary requirement for migration is having a Premium Capacity license. This implies a significant cost for those who need to purchase it. To assist in managing Power BI license expenses according to the client’s specific needs, a cost app has been created.
A report has been developed that allows for a quick assessment of monthly costs based on the plausible scenario. This app is useful for optimizing costs in an existing setup and assisting new clients deciding to adopt Power BI.
In the image, the app is set up for a possible scenario where a client, intending to evaluate the migration opportunity, shows their current situation.
The client purchases 250 Pro licenses, 100 Premium Per User licenses, and one Premium Capacity license, with the capacity utilized by 250 active users and 500 occasional users. This situation incurs a monthly cost of approximately €8,900.
The app presents three alternative scenarios at the bottom, consisting of purchasing only Pro licenses, Pro licenses for users who already had a Pro license or were occasional, and PPU licenses for frequent users. Finally, it shows the cost of a single Premium Capacity license.
The Premium Capacity license does not apply to individual users but to the storage capacity purchased by an organization and has a monthly cost of €4,675.60 per node. With this license, all Pro and PPU users can share content and collaborate with free users if the content is saved in Premium Capacity workspaces.
A distinction is necessary between frequent and occasional users, as purchasing total capacity requires ensuring that it meets all potential user needs.
This calculator does not allow modifying the purchased SKUs, which remain constant at P1, but it follows Microsoft’s guidance, suggesting that for every 1,000 Premium users, the number of nodes increases by 1. The weight of the two types of users, Frequent and Occasional, is considered proportionally to the possible capacity use, resulting in an optimal number of nodes to purchase.
The green checkmark appears next to the most cost-effective plan, which, in this case, is the purchase of a single Power BI Premium Capacity license with one node, saving more than €4,000 compared to the current situation.
In conclusion, it is important to specify that this app should support cost calculation, but specific client needs must be considered without focusing solely on economic savings, as purchasing different licenses opens up different opportunities.
Power BI Premium Monitoring App
The Premium Metrics App is designed to provide monitoring capabilities for Power BI Premium and Power BI Embedded. Capacity monitoring is crucial for making informed decisions on how to best use Premium capacity resources. For example, it can help identify when it is necessary and beneficial to increase capacity and enable autoscaling. In the case of migration, this app should compensate for the lack of monitoring available in Azure Analysis Services and, once installed, can be accessed from Power BI Services.
To install the monitoring app, administrator rights for the capacity are required.
The app only supports monitoring datasets that use import mode. To monitor live connections in Power BI Service, Azure Analysis Services must be used. When monitoring Power BI Premium and Power BI Embedded, it is important to consider the amount of CPU needed to serve the load at any given time.
For a comprehensive evaluation of this app, it is necessary to understand conditions and limitations:
- The app displays results for the last 14 or 28 days, depending on the visual.
- The app shows only memory measurements and performance breakdowns for datasets.
- The Users column in visual objects displays the number of distinct users who have interacted with the dataset. These interactions can be performed by the users themselves or by Power BI on their behalf. When examining visuals in the app, it is important to consider that background operations performed by Power BI may inflate the number of unique users.
- User-initiated operations (Interactive operations) include opening a report or clicking on a data filter.
- Power BI-initiated operations (Background operations) include system operations, such as dataset or dataflow updates. In some cases, these operations are performed by Power BI on behalf of a user.
- Emails automatically sent to default users will have default filters in the app.
In general, the decision to migrate to Power BI Premium depends on the specific requirements of each client. It is necessary to carefully evaluate benefits and costs. The topic remains forward-looking as Microsoft appears to prioritize consistent investment in Power BI Premium for business data modeling, and thus the added value provided by this service is expected to increase over time.
Blue BI’s in-depth analysis aims to anticipate potential client migration needs and provide a clear understanding of the functionality offered by Microsoft.
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