Quick Tip: Analyze the Fabric Capacity Metrics App Easily

Just a quick tip for anyone using the Fabric Capacity Metrics App.

If you find yourself checking the Metrics app and see a spike in usage you might want to analyze that. How many times did you have to click to get exactly the column you needed? Or before you were able to click any column at all? 😁

You can of course filter on the dates, but sometimes that's not enough detail.

Let's say I want to analyze the spike around November 19th, but I can't click that one red bar that has the highest peak?

When you hover over the visual you can select Focus mode.

This brings up the visual on the entire screen, making it much easier to click on individual bars.

When you select the single bar you are looking for, and click Back to report on the top left you go back to the normal page view, but with that bar still selected.

You can then click Explore and go to the timepoint details.

Making sense in case of huge spikes

Sometimes you may hit a big spike in usage, either by high usage of the capacity, or because the capacity was paused.

In the above case I had a severe throttling issue, where the capacity would have been unavailable for multiple hours and the client decided to pause / unpause the capacity. This effectively takes all the future CU-usage and makes you pay it off at once, hence the enormous spike in usage on November 12th.

Note

Pausing a capacity will almost always increase your Azure bill, next to the Fabric capacities you already have.

The downside is that this immediately renders this visual useless, because now you can't see anything other than that 65000% spike anymore.. 😁

If you want to make this visual meaningful again, you can filter out the date with the very high %, in the filter pane on Date.

Change the selection to Basic filtering and select only the dates without the spike!