power bi premium capacity assignment

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Power BI premium capacity admins

• Office 365 Global Admins and Power BI Admins are Capacity Admins of Power BI Premium capacities by default.
• These admins can assign users as Capacity Admins per capacity during initial setup of the capacity and later via User Permissions within the Premium settings of a capacity in the Power BI Admin Portal.
• Capacity Admins have administrative control over the given capacity but must also be granted assignment permissions in the Users with assignment permissions setting to assign workspaces to premium capacities if the capacity admin will be responsible for associating an app workspace to premium capacity.
• Power BI Admins are expected to have the ability to assign individual workspaces to premium capacity ...

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A Complete Guide to Power BI Pricing and Capacity Management

• February 2, 2023

As business intelligence programs are becoming more sophisticated and nuanced, Power BI has found a unique position in the market as a go-to BI tool. As an increasing number of organizations are adopting Power BI, they’ve got lots of questions about the various aspects of Power BI like capacity and pricing.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with more than a decade of experience implementing digital solutions, CloudMoyo’s experts have shared some insights that can help your organization identify which solution might fit your enterprise BI needs. Keep reading for an overview of dedicated capacities, supported workloads, content sharing, and other Power BI features that might be helpful in your decision-making!

Power BI Capacity Management

Power BI offers three tiers of service – Free, Pro, and Premium based on usage:

• Power BI Free for Content Creation: Use the free Power BI Desktop tool to author reports and prepare, model, and create data visualizations.
• Power BI Pro for Content Publication: Collaborate with colleagues, model data, author content, share dashboards, publish reports, and perform ad hoc analysis.
• Power BI Premium for Content Consumption: Read and interact with pre-published dashboards and reports with either a per-user Power BI Pro license or a Power BI Premium license for large-scale databases.

While Power BI Pro and Premium both have their own set of extensive features, we’ve highlighted some of the unique features of Power BI Premium in Figure 1. These features are in addition to those common with Power BI Pro.

Power BI Pricing Management

The total users and users by category who interact with Power BI reports or dashboards are the biggest factors in estimating the cost of Power BI for your organization. There are three categories of users:

• Pro Users: These users require collaboration, authorization of content, data modeling, ad hoc analysis, dashboard sharing, and report publishing.
• Frequent Users: Users frequently interact with reports or dashboards.
• Occasional Users: Users occasionally consume the reports and dashboards.

Based on these identified user types, the Power BI pricing calculator can be used to estimate the cost. Let’s work with an example here:

Suppose an organization contains a total of 4500 users who’ll have access to Power BI. Let’s divide these users into 3 categories – 20% pro users, 35% frequent users, and 45% occasional users. Based on the pricing calculator, the total cost for 4500 users will be $23,976/month.

Power BI Premium

Power BI Premium provides dedicated and enhanced resources to run the Power BI service for your organization with features like:

• Greater scale and performance
• Flexibility to license by capacity
• Unify self-service and enterprise BI
• Extend on-premises BI with Power BI Report Server
• Support for data residency by region (Multi-Geo)
• Share data with anyone without purchasing a per-user license

The Office 365 subscription of Power BI Premium is available in two SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) families:

• P SKUs (P1-P3) for embedding and enterprise features. The commitment is monthly or yearly, and it’s billed monthly. This includes a license to install Power BI Report Server on-premises.
• EM SKUs (EM1-EM3) for organizational embedding. The commitment is yearly and is billed monthly. EM1 and EM2 SKUs are available only through volume licensing plans. You can’t purchase them directly.

Capacity Nodes

As described earlier, there are two Power BI Premium SKU families – EM and P. The SKU represents the storage, memory, and a set number of resources consisting of processors where ALL SKUs are considered capacity nodes. Each SKU contains some operational limits on the number of DirectQuery and Live Connections per second and the number of parallel model refreshes.

Processing is achieved by a set number of v-cores, divided equally between the back-end and front-end. Back-end v-cores are also known as active datasets where it has assigned a fixed amount of memory that’s primarily used to host models. Back-end v-cores are responsible for core Power BI functionalities which contain the following activities: query processing, cache management, running R services, model refresh, natural language processing, and server-side rendering of reports and images.

Front-end v-cores are responsible for the following activities: web services, dashboard & report document management, access rights management scheduling, APIs, uploads & downloads, and everything related to the user experiences. Storage is set to 100 TB per capacity node. The resources and limitations of each Premium SKU (and equivalently sized A SKU) are described in table 2:

Workload Configuration in Premium Capacity Using Power BI Admin Portal

To fulfill the capacity resource requirements, you will need to change memory and other settings if the default settings are not meeting the requirements. The steps to configure workloads in the Power BI admin portal are:

• In Capacity settings > PREMIUM CAPACITIES, select a capacity.
• Under MORE OPTIONS, expand Workloads.
• Enable one or more workloads and set a value for Max Memory and other settings.
• Select Apply.

Different parameters contributing to workloads in a premium capacity are AI workload, datasets, max intermediate row set count, max offline dataset size, max result row set count, query memory limit, query timeout, automatic page refresh (in preview), data flows, container size, and paginated reports.

Power BI Embedded

The total cost of Power BI Embedded depends on the type of node chosen and the number of nodes deployed. Node types differ based on the number of v-cores and RAM. The Power BI Embedded pricing by Microsoft is available on monthly/hourly basis across different regions. Table 3 covers the pricing for the Central U.S. region by the hour.

Frequently Asked Questions (by CloudMoyo Customers)

When should i choose power bi pro for deployment.

For small and large deployments, Power BI Pro works great to deliver full Power BI capabilities to all users. Employees across roles and departments can engage in ad-hoc analysis, dashboard sharing and report publishing, collaboration, and other related activities.

Not all my users require the full capabilities of Power BI Pro – do I still need a Power BI Pro license?

Even though you have Power BI Premium, you will need Power BI Pro to publish reports, share dashboards, collaborate with colleagues in workspaces, and engage in other related activities. To use a Power BI Premium capacity, you need to assign a workspace to a capacity. The following use cases will help you to understand the scenarios in which you can go for Power BI Pro/Premium or both.

Do you need self-service BI?

Self-service BI isn’t just a trend anymore – it’s become a necessity for efficient information sharing within an organization. Various professionals can collaborate, publish, share, and perform ad-hoc analysis easily with advanced self-service BI tools.

Can Power BI support big data analytics and on-premises, as well as cloud reporting?

Power BI Premium provides enterprise BI, big data analytics, cloud, and on-premises reporting along with advanced administration and deployment controls. It also provides dedicated cloud computing and storage resources that allow any user to consume Power BI content.

So, Do I Need Power BI?

Depending on your enterprise business intelligence needs, it’s important to choose the right Power BI offering for you! From the number of users to pricing to varying features of each Power BI option, we hope this guide helps guide you in your decision.

Every organization is unique in its needs and goals. And the right technology partner can help you identify the best solution based on your enterprise needs! CloudMoyo experts have decades of experience working with various technologies, including Power BI and other Microsoft tools to transform your organization with resilience. Our goal is to support organizations on their digital transformation journeys, future-proofing their business with agility and scalability as they grow.

Have more questions about Power BI? Get in touch here !

Not quite ready to connect? Check out some of our customer success stories :

• Optimizing Power BI Report Performance During Peak Hours Using Visual Studio Testing Services
• Indivior Improves Reporting and Contract Management Process by Implementing Power BI and ODS

Originally posted 06/18/2020, Updated 02/02/2023.

By Abhay Jadhav, Analytics team CloudMoyo

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A Guide to Understanding Power BI Premium Capacity Licenses

By Dan Brewster

Director of Client Services – Microsoft, NPI

December 07, 2021

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In a crowded business intelligence solution marketplace, few solutions match the popularity (and revenue) of Microsoft’s Power BI. More than 250,000 organizations use Power BI, including 97 percent of the Fortune 500 . Over the years, the offering has evolved quite a bit – most recently with the introduction of Power BI Premium capacity licenses. For many customers, these licenses present an opportunity for savings or at least a rightsized realignment of use and spend.

This is something I’ve written about before , but think it’s worth a revisit. Why? Enterprises are eager to create and foster a data culture within their organizations. Many Microsoft customers are taking a fresh look at the vendor’s capabilities and how they can be utilized to enable data-driven decision making.

The Evolution of Power BI

Part of the Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards. Power BI has been around for a lot longer than most people realize. It was first brought to market in 2011 and was bundled with SQL Server. Since then Microsoft has made improvements to the data visualization capabilities and has enhanced the product with many new features. Microsoft released Power BI for Office 365 in late 2013 and has continued adding features to the product over time. One of the most significant releases occurred in May 2017 with the introduction of Power BI Premium.

It makes sense to look at the world before Power BI Premium for just a moment, though. When the Power BI Pro product was released, all users required a license – whether they were content creators or content consumers.  This could (and did) have significant financial implications for enterprise customers. Suppose you had a core team of 50 Power BI content creators, but there were 20,000 employees in the organization that were viewing dashboards or occasionally viewing reports from Power BI. Before Power BI Premium, you would need to have purchased 20,000 Power BI Pro User licenses. Considering that the Power Platform is offered as a subscription product, each user would have required a monthly subscription, which was priced at $7.47 per month under an Enterprise Agreement.  $7.47 x 20,000 x 12 months? That’s right, you did the math correctly – that would have been $1.792M annually. Wow!

Things changed in 2017 with the introduction of Power BI Premium, which is a reserved (and dedicated) capacity for your workload analytics. As an aside, Power BI Pro’s analytical capacity is not dedicated – it is shared with other customers. The new dedicated capacity license meant you could size your Power BI Premium investment based upon your need. Microsoft offers various tiers of computational power with the Power BI Premium capacity SKUs (EM1, EM2, EM3, P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5) – these levels all offer different amount of ram, virtual cores, and support for multiple queries per second. Visit this page for more information about the various Power BI Premium capacity tiers available.

The Price Advantage of Power BI Premium Capacity Licenses

Let’s revisit the pricing for just a moment. Prior to Power BI Premium, you could be looking at significant spend for your Power BI consumers. With the release of Power BI Premium capacity licenses, Microsoft now only requires the content creator to have a Power BI Pro User license (or, since April 2021, a Power BI Premium User license).  The content consumers can simply access dashboards and view content via the Power BI Premium Capacity licenses.

Using the scenario above, a customer could purchase 50 Power BI Pro subscriptions for its core team of content creators for an annual cost of $4482.00 ($7.47 x 50 x 12). As for the rest of the 19,950 content consumers, the customer could choose from the following capacity licenses SKUs based on their requirements:

Even with upper tier pricing, the combined annual cost is well below the initial $1.792M that would have been spent prior to the introduction of Power BI Premium capacity licenses.

Material savings are available for those customers that want to better align usage, requirements and spend. If you’re interested, I suggest visiting this page on Microsoft’s website to better understand the sizing and capacity of each of the various tiers. Truthfully, some experimentation will likely be necessary as the size of the data set, complexity of the queries, and the number of concurrent users will all have an impact on performance. Microsoft used to feature a Power BI Premium sizing calculator on its website, but the calculator has since been removed. I’m guessing this is due to the many variables involved in properly sizing the demand.

Here’s another suggestion: These are monthly subscription licenses, so it makes sense to start off on a conservative basis and add capacity as your run into performance limitations. Every client NPI has worked with that has made the switch to Power BI Premium capacity licenses has reduced their Power BI spend. If you’d like to learn more about how you can save on your Power BI costs, reach out to us .

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Issue: Unable to assign premium capacity to Power BI workspace via flow using API

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Roles in workspaces in Power BI

• 14 contributors

Workspaces are places to collaborate with colleagues and create collections of dashboards, reports, semantic models, and paginated reports. This article describes the different roles in workspaces, and what people in each role can do. For more information, see workspaces in Power BI .

To create a new workspace, see Create a workspace .

Roles let you manage who can do what in a workspace, so teams can collaborate. Workspaces allow you to assign roles to individuals, and also to user groups such as security groups, Microsoft 365 groups, and distribution lists.

To grant access to a workspace, assign one of the following workspace roles to a user group or individual: Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer. For more information, see Give users access to workspaces .

Everyone in a user group gets the role that you've assigned. If someone is in several user groups, they get the highest level of permission that's provided by the roles that they're assigned. If you nest user groups and assign a role to a group, all the contained users get that role's permissions. All these capabilities, except viewing and interacting, require a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. For more information, see licensing .

Workspace roles

1 Contributors can update the app that's associated with the workspace , if the workspace Admin delegates this permission to them. However, they can't publish a new app or change who has permission to edit it.

2 Contributors and Viewers can also share items in a workspace or an app, including semantic models, if the app creator selected Allow users to share the semantic models in this app . See the Create and manage multiple audiences section of "Publish an app in Power BI."

3 To copy a report to another workspace, and to create a report in another workspace based on a semantic model in the current workspace, you need Build permission for the semantic model . You also need at least the Contributor role on the source and destination workspaces. For semantic models in the original workspace, if you have at least the Contributor role, you automatically have Build permission through your workspace role. For details, see Copy reports from other workspaces .

4 Keep in mind that you also need permissions on the gateway. Those permissions are managed elsewhere, independent of workspace roles and permissions. For details, see Manage an on-premises gateway .

5 If the items are in a workspace in a Premium capacity, you can view and interact with items in the Power BI service even if you don't have a Power BI Pro license.

6 To subscribe yourself or others requires a paid (Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU)() license. When you subscribe others, those recipients also need a paid subscription, unless the items are in a workspace in a Premium capacity. B2B guest users can't subscribe others, only themselves.

7 If your admin has enabled this feature, see Manage featured content .

8 If your admin has enabled this feature, see Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features .

9 If you want your users with the Viewer role to Analyze in Excel or export underlying data from the datasets in the workspace, you need to also give them Build permission on the appropriate datasets.

• You can assign users to roles, either alone or in a group, even if they can't use the role. In other words, you can assign users who don't have Power BI Pro or PPU licenses to a role that requires a license. See Licenses for details.
• Use the Viewer role to enforce row-level security (RLS) for users who browse content in a workspace. You can also enforce RLS without giving access to the workspace, publish an app and distribute it to those users, or use sharing to distribute content .
• Members can add users to a workspace with lower permissions, but can't remove users from any workspace roles.

If one of the workspaces is in a shared capacity, everyone you add to it needs a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. These users can all collaborate on the dashboards and reports in the workspace. If you want to distribute content to others inside your organization, either assign Power BI Pro licenses to those users or place the workspace in a Power BI Premium capacity.

When the workspace is in a Power BI Premium capacity, users with the Viewer role can access the workspace even if they don't have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. However, if you assign these users a higher role like Admin, Member, or Contributor, they're prompted to start a Pro trial when they try to access the workspace 8 . If you want users without Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licenses to use the Viewer role, make sure they don't also have other workspace roles, either as individuals or as part of a user group.

Publishing reports to the workspace enforces existing licensing rules. If you try to publish from Power BI Desktop or other client tools without a Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you see the error, "Only users with Power BI Pro licenses can publish to this workspace."

Power BI US Government isn't available as a Free license. For licensing details, see Power BI for US government customers .

Guest users

Microsoft Entra B2B Guest users who have been assigned a workspace role or granted specific item permissions, will be able to perform the operations permitted by those roles or permissions.

Guest users who have been assigned workspace roles or specific item permissions will continue to have those roles and/or permissions, even if the Allow Microsoft Entra guest users to edit and manage content in the organization tenant setting is disabled.

Considerations and limitations

A limitation to be aware of:

• A person with a Power BI Pro license can be a member of a maximum of 1,000 workspaces.

Related content

• Create workspaces in Power BI
• Give users access to workspaces
• Questions? Try asking the Power BI Community

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Microsoft Power BI Blog

• Paginated Reports

Get data with Power Query available in Power BI Report Builder (Preview)

We are pleased to announce the ability to use the Get Data experience and connect to 100+ data sources such as Snowflake, Databricks and AWS Redshift from Power BI Report Builder. You can transform the data and select the M-Query to be used for the paginated report. All you need is the latest version of Power BI Report Builder Install Power BI Report Builder from the Microsoft Download Center.  

For this blog, we are creating an NYC Taxi Report paginated report with data in a Snowflake backend. To do this, l aunch Power BI Report Builder and navigate to the “Data” tab.

Select “Get Data” from the toolbar.  

This will launch the “Get Data” experience.

You can search for the data source that you want to connect to or “ View more ” .  

For this blog, I selected a S nowflake data source. Enter the server, warehouse and, credentials . You can use organizational accounts as well. Have questions ? Learn more about the Power query online experience .  You can either “Create a new connection” or use a shareable cloud connection. Learn more about shareable cloud connections.

Choose data and s elect the table(s) that you want for your M-query . Select the “Transform data” button.  

Once you “Transform data ”, the power query editor window will open. 

You can perform power query operations such as transforming and combining the data . The M query can also be modified in the editor. Learn more about Power Query . Select the “Create” button once you have the Query that you want as the dataset in Power BI Report Builder.  

Create the paginated re po rt of your choice with the data from the data source supported via th e Get Data experience.   

Once you create the report, you can Publish the report to the Power BI service. Learn more about publishing a paginated report to the Power BI service .

You can share this report with others as well from the Power BI service.

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Want to edit the dataset ? You can right click on the dataset name and “Edit Mashup.. ”  

This will open the Get Data experience. Make updates that you want and select “Create”. The dataset will be edited based on the changes that you make.  

All functionality such as parameters and filters work like they do for any other data source in Power BI Report Builder.  

A few notes…

This feature is currently not available to Sovereign clouds and will be available when generally available.  

With this version, we have limitations. The main ones are listed below. Learn more about current limitations and considerations.  

• When there a multiple mashup queries in the editor, the last one is used for the dataset creation.    You can add additional datasets from the same data source by going through the Get Data experience a second time and moving the intended M-query to the end of the “Queries” list. 
• Parameters must be manually mapped by name between the mashup and the dataset.  
• We currently do not support gateway connections.  
• Learn more about connecting to new data sources from Power BI Report Builder
• Give us feedback at ideas.fabric.microsoft.com . Please add “Power BI Report Builder” or “paginated” to the title and give us enough information to make improvements to meet your requirements.
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