Insights into Power BI & Fabric Governance, Administration, and Capacity Monitoring

In this training day, we’ll dive into the essentials of effectively governing and managing Power BI/Fabric environments. You will gain insight into key administrative tasks, capacity management, and monitoring best practices to ensure optimal performance and resource utilization within their Fabric deployment.

By the end of this session, you will:
* Understand the role and responsibilities of a Fabric administrator
* Be equipped to manage and optimize Fabric capacities, including using the bursting and smoothing options
* Gain hands-on knowledge of tools such as the Fabric Capacity Metrics App and Admin Monitoring workspace to establish operational efficiency
* Learn about best practices for capacity planning, automation, and cost management in a Fabric deployment
* Walk away with troubleshooting techniques to maintain a high-performing Fabric environment

Topics covered during the day:
* The role of the Fabric Administrator: An overview of the permissions, responsibilities, and tools available to administrators within the Fabric environment
* Admin Monitoring Workspace: Explore the Admin Monitoring workspace to keep track of performance, potential issues, and system health
* Security and Compliance Monitoring: Ensuring compliance and security standards within Fabric, including audit logs
* Understanding Fabric Capacities: Dive into the mechanics of capacity units, resource allocation, and the different capacity management features such as bursting and smoothing
* Capacity Metrics App: Learn to leverage the Capacity Metrics App to gain insights into resource utilization, demand patterns, and allocation
* Capacity Planning and Optimization: Best practices for planning capacity needs and optimizing resources based on organizational demands
* Automation and Alerts: Implementing automated alerts, notifications, and actions based on capacity and usage thresholds
* Troubleshooting and Diagnostics: Identifying and addressing common issues within Fabric environments, focusing on proactive diagnostic tools

Key takeaways:
* Comprehensive understanding of Fabric governance and administration tasks
* Practical skills to manage and monitor performance in Fabric capacities
* Tools for proactive management and troubleshooting
* Strategies for ensuring compliance, security, and cost-efficiency

This session's target audience:
* Fabric Administrators and IT professionals responsible for managing Fabric environments
* IT Managers and leaders interested in governance and capacity planning
* System Analysts and Engineers who want to broaden their skillset and need insights into monitoring and optimization techniques
* Compliance Officers looking to understand Fabric’s audit and monitoring capabilities

This interactive session will provide valuable insights for both new and experienced professionals aiming to streamline governance and optimize the performance of their Fabric environments. There will also be plenty of time to bring your own problems to the table.

Optimizing Your Power BI Workflow with Project Files, Source Control, and TMDL

Imagine you're part of a dynamic analytics team at a rapidly growing tech company. Your team relies heavily on Power BI to create insightful reports and dashboards that drive key business decisions. However, as the volume of data increases and more team members contribute to the projects, you start encountering challenges: messy project files, difficulty in tracking changes, and complex data models that are hard to manage.
One day, your team lead calls a meeting. She shares a story about another department that faced similar issues but managed to turn things around. Their secret? Implementing a structured approach to managing Power BI project files, using source control to track every change, and leveraging Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL) to handle their complex data models. Inspired, your team decides to adopt these practices.
Fast forward a few months, and your team's workflow has transformed. Projects are well-organized, changes are easily tracked, and data models are efficiently managed. Reports are more accurate, collaboration is smoother, and your team's productivity has soared. This presentation will guide you through these strategies, showing you how to replicate this success in your own Power BI projects.

In this session, I will guide you through these strategies, demonstrating how to replicate this success in your own Power BI projects.
By the end of this session, you will be equipped with practical knowledge and tools to optimize their Power BI workflows, ensuring their data analytics projects are well-organized, versioned, and scalable.
We will start with a regular PBIX-file and gradually transform it into an organized, versioned model. Using Visual Studio Code, we will set up source control in Azure DevOps with the PBIP-format, apply TMDL and eventually integrate Git into the workspace.
Note: This session assumes a basic understanding of Power BI. Fundamentals of source control and branching will not be covered.

Fabric Capacity Metrics Demystified

In the world of Power BI and Fabric we talk a lot about capacities, whether it's Premium Capacities or Fabric Capacities. However, when working on Power BI or Fabric these capacities often remain a bit unknown. How do they actually work? You've heard of this concept called 'bursting', what does that actually mean? How do you know if you're not paying too much for your capacity?

In this session, I will take you through the ins-and-outs of your capacity(ies). Starting with some key concepts on capacities and how they work, we'll quickly dive into how they operate and how your usage is actually charged to your capacity. Finally we'll look into some practical examples on managing your capacity, leveraging the Fabric REST APIs and Semantic Link to some really cool stuff.

This session is mainly geared towards Fabric and/or Capacity Administrators, though a better understanding of capacities and how they work will also help content creators in developing more efficient solutions. The session requires no prior knowledge, though some familiarity with capacities and/or the Capacity Metrics App will definitely lead to you getting more value out of this session.

Managing your Fabric Capacities

As a service, Fabric Capacities are something that most of us aren't accustomed to. A Fabric Capacity offers you a SaaS service of self-managed compute and storage. However, as an Azure resource, it also has some inherent PaaS attributes with a Pay-as-you-go model and the possibility to pause your capacity altogether.

These aspects of Capacities cause questions with many Fabric users and admins alike. How do you choose the appropriate size of capacity, for example? And how do you go about sharing resources within your capacity, scaling your capacity, utilizing pause/resume options, and isolating selected workloads to prevent the noisy neighbor problem?

Fortunately, Fabric capacities also offer a wonderful array of opportunities for dealing with these challenges and, even more interestingly, optimizing your setup. This session will focus on these opportunities. We'll investigate several strategies you can leverage to protect your most important workloads and how you can use the right tools to prevent capacity constraints from impacting your environment.

We'll dive into the mechanics of Fabric Capacities, exploring concepts like bursting and smoothing, and how they can help you manage your compute limits effectively. Additionally, we'll discuss practical tips for monitoring capacity usage, optimizing resource allocation, and the tools you can use to automate these processes. By the end of this session, you'll have a clear understanding of how to manage and optimize your Fabric Capacities to ensure seamless performance and cost-efficiency.

In this session we'll quickly revisit the basics of capacities and how they operate, however, some prior knowledge on these capacities (especially on the bursting and smoothing mechanisms) will greatly benefit the audience.

Notebooks in Fabric: why Power BI Developer should care (greatly)

By heart, I'm a developer in Power BI, focusing on semantic models. I speak DAX and M fluently (okay, fairly fluent). I started in data with T SQL. So, when notebooks using Spark were introduced with Microsoft Fabric I didn't see how that would influence my day-to-day all to much. Man, how wrong was I..

Built into Fabric Notebooks is a feature called 'Semantic Link'. This feature enables notebooks to connect to semantic models living within your environment. Even more, using notebooks you can interact with these semantic models. For example, you can run DAX queries against the model to extract data. You can also access the XMLA endpoint or call on APIs to actually make changes to your model. The possibilities are endless!

In this session we'll dive into a number of hands-on examples of notebooks greatly improving the life of the Power BI Developer. Assessing the impact of a change in the semantic model? Checking whether that report aligns with your best practices? Validating your data before after a refresh? Or do you want to monitor the size of your model over time? Everything is possible and I'll show you how! And the best thing is: you barely need to learn yet another programming language!

In this session an introduction of notebooks and the features used will be made. An intermediate knowledge of semantic models is recommended to follow along some of the more deep examples shown.

The Fabric Decision Web: Making Implementation Choices That Match Your Organization

Most Fabric implementations force six critical decisions: capacity organization, workspace topology, data architecture, user enablement, COE structure, and governance approach. The challenge? Not only do these decisions lack universal answers, but some lock you in while others can evolve as you learn.

This session helps you navigate implementation choices by exploring what each decision depends on and which ones are hardest to change later. Drawing on real-world examples, we'll examine common failures: IT teams applying infrastructure mental models to SaaS governance, BI teams building source-driven architectures that prevent integration, organizations paralyzed by trying to get everything perfect upfront.

You'll learn to identify where your organization sits on the Business-IT spectrum, match patterns to your context, and distinguish between decisions that need careful planning (capacity topology, workspace boundaries) versus those you should iterate (enablement approaches, governance policies). Whether starting fresh or untangling existing deployments, you'll leave knowing how to make coherent choices and adapt them as your implementation matures.

Key Takeaways
1. A framework for making six critical Fabric implementation decisions based on organizational context
2. Recognition patterns for common failures caused by organizational mismatches
3. Understanding of which decisions lock you in versus which can evolve
4. Practical criteria for choosing patterns that fit your organization's position on the Business-IT spectrum
5. Coherent decision-making across capacity, workspace, architecture, enablement, COE, and governance

Target Audience:
- Fabric capacity administrators
- Fabric tenant administrators
- Center of Excellence leads
- Analytics team leaders
- IT leaders managing Fabric deployments
- Data architects planning Fabric implementations