There's No Free Lunch - (Billing of) Preview Features in Fabric

Another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

I decided to leave "Governance & Administration" out of the titles of my blog posts from now on.
The titles were getting a bit lengthy, just because I wanted to include the focus on Governance & Administration. I am already using labels which you can use for that: Governance, Administration, etc..

Today, let's talk about preview features in Fabric!

Preview features

First of all, when using Preview features in Fabric, you should be aware of the small print.

Next, we all know, there's no such thing as a free lunch, right?

Because: preview does not mean free! Let me explain.

Two of those preview features - SQL Database and Workspace Monitoring - have recently moved to a charging model as Fabric develops further. It's essential to understand these adjustments if you want to maximize your resources, govern your capacity and efficiently control expenses.

Fabric SQL Database

I wrote about it earlier when they were about to change the tenant setting for SQL Database: you should be aware that billing for SQL Database already started.

Compute and data storage for SQL databases are now charged according to your Fabric capacity beginning of February 1, 2025. The start date of backup billing is April 1, 2025. You can only pay for the resources you use because compute charges only apply when you are actively using the service. Automatic backups and storage are priced individually each month. Check Microsoft Learn for more details on billing and utilization reporting.

If you check the doc's on the usage of SQL Database you can see that:

1 Fabric capacity unit corresponds to 0.383 Database vCores, or, 1 Database vCore corresponds to 2.611 Fabric capacity unit.

For example, a Fabric capacity SKU F64 has 64 capacity units, which is equivalent to 24.512 SQL database vCores.

Compute is billed by the minute, but the database is also kept alive for 15 minutes afterwards. So if you use it for 4 minutes, you are actually billed for 19 minutes!
Storage will be billed per hour, regardless of usage.

Workspace Monitoring

Workspace Monitoring gathers and arranges logs and metrics from different Fabric components by building an Eventhouse database inside your workspace, providing insightful data about workspace performance and usage.
You can use this tool to optimize queries, minimize data downtime, investigate mistakes, and fix performance concerns.

As of February 2025, Workspace Monitoring billing has begun. Make sure you have a Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity and that the required tenant settings are set up in order to enable monitoring in your workspace. Check Microsoft Learn for a detailed tutorial on how to enable and use Workspace Monitoring.

Check your usage after this changeover

It is crucial to examine your present and anticipated consumption in order to foresee any expenses now that invoicing for these functions has been activated. To keep an eye on capacity utilization across all workloads and make sure it fits your organization's demands and budget, use the Fabric Capacity Metrics app. 

See Fabric capacity billing guidelines for a more thorough explanation of how these modifications affect your Azure bill.

Are you using these preview features in your tenant?

And did you know they are already billed?

Let me know in the comments!